


Bertholdt

by Tvieandli



Series: St Maria's [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-17
Updated: 2014-01-21
Packaged: 2017-12-29 17:01:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 12
Words: 41,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1007872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tvieandli/pseuds/Tvieandli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reiner still had the upper hand. Which meant that cornered alone in the boys bathroom during class was the hour of Bertholdt's reckoning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Destruction of Reiner Braun

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for this include: Slurs, Dubious Consent, Talk of Physical and Emotional Abuse, and Discussion of Conversion Therapy.
> 
> Another note, in this story neither Reiner, or Bert are meant to be bad people. They are both in horrible situations, and reacting without necessarily thinking about it. Both parties are in the wrong.

Bert wasn't used to hands on him. He attempted to avoid contact. He shyed from fights. Reiner, on the other hand, had been up to his elbows in physical confrontations his whole life, and despite the sudden height difference created by Bert's latest growth spurt, Reiner still had the upper hand when it came to size. Which meant that cornered alone in the boys bathroom during class was the hour of Bert's reckoning.

Reiner shifted from one foot to the other as if contemplating the whole thing. As if contemplating the bit of hair he'd ripped out of Bert's head dragging him there. He cocked his head, and Bert swallowed hard as their eyes met.

To think that there had been a time when he'd found the odd color of Reiner Braun's eyes pretty. He wanted to strangle his middle school self like a red headed step child.

There was a good deal of posturing, feeling, and testing out of the position of power Reiner now held over the other boy as he strutted closer. Bert tried to draw himself up on his knees to seem proud, if only a bit.

The first punch hit his cheek like a ton of bricks. It seemed like being the quarterback had it's advantages. Reiner was, after all, the biggest, strongest kid in school, and football practice had only made him more formidable.

The second caught him in the forehead before he had time to properly react, pushing him down onto the tile floor. Bert threw his hands up over his face defensively, hoping that somehow Reiner would find him pitiful and leave.

"What's the matter, faggot?" the boy teased, holding his hands out to either side of his body as he leaned forward, daring Bert to try something. "Too scared to fight back? Too scared to stop me?"

Bert bit his cheek, and took a shaky breath. He was scared. He was. He was terrified.

Reiner's steps fell heavy by his head, and Bert found his hair in the other boy's grip once more, being dragged again to somewhere unknown. He scrambled hand over foot, trying to keep those cruel fingers from leaving him with bald spots.

He only just caught sight of the toilet before Reiner attempted to shove his head into it. Bert had never gotten a swirly, but that didn't mean he wasn't afraid of them. He'd heard people could die getting swirlies. Not to mention the germs, and the risk of illness.

He balked, catching himself on the sides of the stall with his hands, and pushing backwards into Reiner's palms. The other boy lost his balance temporarily in the unexpected shift of weight. Just long enough for Bert to scramble to his feet, and get angry.

The fear was suddenly gone. He had nothing left but two years worth of resentment, and bitterness all for this boy who called him "faggot," and tormented him in the hallways. He hated him. He hated Reiner Braun with all of his being.

Fuck the few times in middle school he'd been misleadingly nice. Fuck how he'd been charming, and funny. Fuck him.

He shoved hard into Reiner's chest, slamming him against the stalls flimsy dividing wall, making the unit tremble fearfully. Reiner took a gasping breath as some of the air was forced from his lungs, and shoved Bert back.

Bert's hands found his wrists, and held to tight to them as he leaned forward, and bit down hard into the exposed skin of Reiner's throat. It got him another gasp, and Reiner's body surged into his, sucking breath turning into a moan.

Bert pulled back as he felt Reiner's hand fist in his shirt collar, and found the other boy looking dazed, and out of it. There was a pause, a readjustment, and Reiner surged forward again, mouth slamming against Bert's.

Bert had a moment of strange and intense denial. He pushed Reiner back again, but he didn't go nearly so far as he had the last time. This wasn't Glee, he thought first, and it sure as hell wasn't the poorly thought out plot to a high school based porn, so what the fuck did Reiner think he was doing?

"Don't you mock me," he hissed into the space between them.

Reiner shook his head vehemently, and surged forward so that their lips hit together again, teeth digging into skin with the force. Still, Bert felt the rise of strange denial. He wanted to be sick. And then it occurred.

Reiner Braun had ruined his life. Reiner Braun had decided he was gay, and smeared it all over their proper, little catholic school. And Reiner Braun had just given him the power to get back at him.

It was a fucked up move, kissing back. Bertholdt had never thought of using sex as a weapon before, but now it seemed so simple. His phone was still in his back pocket. He had the truth, now he just needed the evidence to prove it.

Reiner pushed up against him hard, and Bert was left without a doubt that this was genuine. Reiner Braun fully intended, however subconsciously or without his own consent, the have sex with him. Bert wondered how on earth someone could be so horrible as this. He couldn't comprehend it.

Reiner's hand came up to seek purchase on the stall behind Bert's head, but Bert pushed him back a third time, and shoved downwards so the other boy hit his knees on the tile.

His phone was in his back pocket.

Reiner didn't take time to think about what he was doing when he started to desperately fumble with Bert's uniform pants. It must have been the rush from the idea of revenge that had gotten him hard in the end, because Bert was certainly still disgusted by the whole display. Still, there was power in it. There was power in knowing that this boy who had tortured him and ruined him was so close to getting his dues.

There was an eagerness in the other boy when the brunt of it was finally in his face, a kind of desperation to do what he had committed to. He swallowed more in a single approach than Bert had expected, eyes closed, throat opened.

He'd practiced. He'd practiced in some way. Likely with other boys. Perhaps with the cucumbers his mother bought from the store.

Bert reached into his back pocket, gritting his teeth to keep his mind clear, and pulled the phone out.

This would be so easy. It would be so just. And in the end he would be the one who suffered least given the fact that his reputation was already shit.

He flicked through screens, watching Reiner's face to be sure he didn't suspect it, and caught the picture.

It was a thing of beauty, he decided as his placed a foot against Reiner's collar bone, and slammed him into the stall's side once more.

"You loose," he said, pants still undone, dick still hanging out the front. Reiner looked confused until Bert turned the phone around, and is dawned on him. "I win."

He didn't say anything. He didn't move. His breath stilled, and he waited almost patiently, very clearly aware that he was tasting the last moments of his simple life. It was all about to get very complicated.

"Now give me a reason not to show this to the world," Bert challenged. Reiner remained silent, kneeling on the floor with Bert's foot on his shoulder. "I'm waiting," Bert told him impatiently.

"Tell me what I need to do," he finally said.

"Go home," Bert said. "Go to you parents, and tell them all about this, or I plaster this all over your Facebook wall, and the whole school knows."

"They'll send me to camp." Reiner was talking about a conversion camp. They were ghost stories for every queer kid in school. The Nuns told horrors about them, but no one they'd ever known had ever gone. It was always cousins in Tennessee, or something like that.

"I don't care," Bert told him. And he didn't. Reiner Braun deserved worse. He deserved to be locked in a concentration camp.

There was fear in his eyes. The kind of fear Bert had felt every time he'd seen him in the hallway. Fear, and then great sadness. That was something he hadn't expected.

Reiner hung his head, and nodded. "Alright," he said. "Just so long as you know it's not the same as what you've been through."

Bert laughed. It would probably be easier, honestly. How bad could it be? Catholics loved their own, and Reiner had it all perfectly easy in his straight acting little life. He was big, and strong, and good looking. He was the star quarterback. He was dating Annie Leonhart. Camp would be a cake walk compared to everything he'd forced Bert through.

"I don't give a shit," Bert said, sliding the phone back into his pocket, and tucking himself back into his pants. He left Reiner there, knowing that this petty move wouldn't be enough. He'd have to wait for his next course of action though. He'd have to plan something big.

\----

 

Bert had never had much interaction with Annie, though he knew her by sight. She was the head cheerleader. A short, blonde with a strong nose, not that Bert had much room to talk about noses.

He was very surprised when she pulled him into the girl's bathroom the next day. Surprised, and almost panicking because bathrooms were becoming a trend. Her hand was firm on his tie though, and he couldn't find the capability to fight her off.

"I don't know what's going on," she said once she'd checked to see they were alone, locked the door, and climbed up onto the sink counter by the windows. "But Reiner's parents are sending him away to a year long football camp, and when I asked him, he told me to ask you of all people." She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her backpack, and lit one with a match before offering him a puff.

He declined, bowled over by her strange kindness, and odd rebellious tendencies. He'd never heard anything about them before. As far as the school was concerned, Annie was perfect.

"I don't know," Bert said, not really sure what to do in this situation. Annie blew smoke out the window, and fixed him with a stoney look, eyebrows high on her forehead.

"Oh really?" she asked, giving him a quick once-over. "You don't. So what, he's just gonna show up in bible studies next period then, and everything will be normal?"

Bert bit the inside of his lip, feeling sweat bead at his hairline as he reached for his phone, and showed her the picture.

To her credit, Annie didn't even blink, taking the phone out of his hand, and looking a bit more closely. "You're blackmailing him," she observed. "Into what?"

"I had him tell his parents."

Annie slapped a hand over her mouth, cigarette dropping ash over the floor, and her rolled up skirt. On a list of things Bert had never thought to see in his life, Annie Leonhart loosing her stoic facade was probably right above Reiner Braun with a dick in his mouth.

"They sent him to a camp, didn't they?" she asked.

"That's what he said they'd do," Bert told her.

"Fuck!" Her hands found their way into her hair, and Bert thought she'd burn herself like that. "I knew they'd do this if they ever found out."

"You knew?" Bert asked.

She snapped then, taking another drag, and pushing the words, "Of course I knew. He's like my brother," out with the smoke.

"You're not dating then?"

"God no. He kind of dates Krista, but that's always chaperoned by Ymir, and he jokes about how it's more like he's chaperoning them," she said flippantly, clearly still worried.

"You're gay, right?" she asked after a moment of thoughtful silence. "You know about the camps, right?"

"Not really," Bert told her. She looked utterly defeated then, face falling like an elevator with its cables cut. "Maybe you can write him a letter," Bert said.

She nodded, but was otherwise silent until she waved her hand almost imperiously, and said. "You can go".

He went, leaving her on the sink with her smoke, suddenly feeling almost guilty.

 

\----

 

She hounded him for days after that. Bert had no friends, and so it was easy to single him out at lunch, where he was left to sit alone at a table. Or in breaks between classes. She started sitting next to him in the classes they had together, and passing him notes.

It started antagonistic. It started as "I can't believe you're such a horrible person," and some how turned into, "I'm going to the bowling alley after school, you wanna come?"

And somewhere along the line, rumors started that Annie was enough of a slut to go after her boyfriend's punching bag after her boyfriend was gone. He felt horrible about that because he knew it was his reputation that was dragging her's through the mud, but he didn't say anything, and she honestly didn't seem to mind being called fag hag. It didn't even phase her.

And then, when she clearly felt it had gone on to long, she staged a counter strike, standing up in the middle of the cafeteria, and turning to the girls who had somehow found the guts to say things straight to Annie's face.

"You ought to be ashamed," she said softly, making everyone turn, and listen. "Condemning me for attempting to convert the wicked to God's ways, and show them their errors. Isn't it what we should all be doing when we meet someone like him?"

Then she'd sat back down to the silence of the cafeteria, pulled out a copy of the new testament, and began reading as if it were the most natural thing to do. Bert felt horribly naked for the rest of the day.

"You actually believe all that?" he asked as they walked away from school later. She shrugged, and kicked a pine cone.

"Not really. I don't know what I believe, honestly. Maybe there is a God," there was a pause, and she looked across the street at a few of the other students skipped along the opposite sidewalk. "If there is, he's punishing us for something, I'm sure of it."

"How?"

"If he's not mad at us, then why the fuck do we go to St Maria's?" Annie asked harshly, not really speaking to anyone in particular at all. Then she turned, and simply began walking once more. There weren't any more words after that moment. They walked in silence, listening to the shuffling of their shoe soles on the cement.

"What do you think they do in those camps?" Bert asked after a long while. Reiner had been gone a month out of the twelve Annie said his parents expected him to endure.

"I don't know," she said. "Maybe they do just play football," she suggested, but the look on her face said that she didn't believe that. "I heard that they make gay men fuck gay women in order to change them."

Bert thought about being forced to sleep with someone. He thought about the sick feeling in his gut that churned against the notion. He was probably a terrible person. He felt more and more guilty every time he thought about it. Sure, Reiner was no saint, but no one deserved to endure the things Bertholdt had heard since he started asking questions.

He remembered the look on Jean Kirchstein's face when he'd asked. "I hear they give you electroshock therapy. They strap you to a chair, and they make you watch porn, and then they shock you like they used to do in mental hospitals in the sixties."

"Do you think he's okay?"

Annie made a face, and was silent once more.

"Reiner's a douche," she said after a good while, catching Bert off guard. "He's a fucking asshole. The things he did to you, and the reasons he did them are proof of that, but if I'm honest, that doesn't change the fact that he's family. I understand why you did what you did, and I can forgive you for it. I'm big enough to do that, but the thing is I will always love him. I will always worry about him. Always. We're all we have. Our parents don't know us. Our friends don't know us. We are the only two people in the world who understand where the we're coming from. Not even you can fully grok it, because even if you are gay, you have crazy, liberal parents waiting at home for you who only sent you here because it's the best school in the district, who will always love you no matter what."

Bert glared bitterly at the toes of his shoes as he walked. "Are you gay?" he asked. Annie shrugged again.

"I try not to sweat it too much," she said. "I don't think it really matters, honestly. I'm not what my parents want anyway. I'll never be the good little catholic girl they want. I like sex way to much for that."

He was shocked to hear her say something so candidly.

"Reiner worried about it though. It was never something we really talked about, but there were things he'd say. 'Do you think my parents would hate me if I never got married?' 'What do you think about gay people?' He never outright said anything, but it wasn't like I didn't know. He was always worried. It freaked him out so bad sometimes that he'd show up in the middle of the night, and crawl through my window, and sit on my floor, and ask me questions just to make sure I wasn't going to up and cut him out of my life if he ever did have the balls to stop lying."

Bert was quiet, turning that over in his mind. He'd always thought that Reiner just liked the power trip. It had never occurred to him that it was something so deep set. He'd seen the happy jock persona he'd been meant to see, and missed completely the tormented, terrified person underneath it. He was seized with a rolling pity for Reiner Braun then.

"I just want him to come home," she said softly. "I want him to come home so I can punch him in his stupid face, and yell at him."

That was love for Annie, though. Bert understood that that was how it worked in her little world.

"He can't though," she added after a moment. "So I get to punch your face instead."


	2. Learning Annie Leonhart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for implied eating disorders. And just a note that this whole AU is major fucked up.

People stopped calling him names. They still weren't talking to him, but people stopped calling him names. Bert took a moment to revel in that silently. Annie didn't have much to say about it though. Annie didn't have much to say about anything. She just sat across from him at lunch, and mentioned him sitting in on Cheer practice before quietly adding, "We have it joint with football, so there will be plenty of boys in tight pants."

Bert wasn't exactly sure if that was meant to be an incentive. As far as he was concerned he was more interested in the fact that Annie didn't wear any tights underneath her cheer uniform.

"What?" she asked when he didn't respond, "Too good for men's asses in tiny, shiny pants?"

Bert rolled his eyes at the tiny carton of milk sitting in front of him, and Annie laughed softly.

"So you aren't gay?" she asked then. "Wow, I thought gay guys were supposed to know their own. It's like meerkats right? You know each other by scent."

Bert took a moment to try and not be offended on behalf of all gay people everywhere, because that sure as hell was not how he had ever had it explained to him.

"Are you trying to say they live underground, and scream whenever they see a scary, straight lion coming for them?" he asked. It got him another laugh. "That sounds really bigoted, Annie."

"Whatever. There'll still be girls in short skirts, so come anyway."

Of course, Bert wasn't really the type of person to balk against anything Annie told him to do, so even if he hadn't been interested he probably would have ended up sitting in the bleachers, watching Mikasa take another swing for Annie's face.

Of all the things one expected cheer squad practice to be, violent was not something that had ever crossed his mind. And yet there they were, with coach Shadis yelling something toward football practice a few meters away. The football coach appeared in a haze of sweaty teenaged confusion, and anger, putting a hand on Mikasa's shoulder.

He was a short man who Bert had originally thought to be a woman when he'd first caught sight of him in the boy's locker room, facing Shadis' office. He'd been very confused as to why a woman would be in the boy's locker room until the man turned around. According to all reports he was formidable in a way no one saw coming.

"Mikasa," he said in the split second before Mikasa redirected her next punch to be aimed for his face. He dodged it effortlessly, and a few of the football players yelled. Eren Yeager was one of them.

Bert watched with detached interest as the coach deflected a few more of Mikasa's hits. It looked like a kung-fu movie had broken out on the field.

"Your form is sloppy," Annie said calmly, calling Mikasa's attention back to her despite the coach's clear desire to keep that from happening.

They traded blows for a few more moments before the football coach called Eren out of the throng of players. Bert watched him map things out on the air with the tips of his fingers, and wave Eren in.

Eren trotted in a half circle around them before crouching down, and springing forward quickly, catching Mikasa around the waist, and tackling her to the ground.

"Ladies," the coach said. "I will punch you both in your tiny little throats if you do not stop acting like infants."

Mikasa spit dirt, and snarled at him.

"Keep her pinned, Eren. As you both understand, Keith and I are getting older, and we don't have the kind of energy you have anymore. By which I mean to say keep your shits in the bowl, and out of my face. I don't want to have to clean up your mess all the damn time. Now can we continue practice like civilized human beings?"

Annie nodded, and Mikasa grudgingly grunted an affirmative.

"Let her up, Eren," the coach said, and Eren bounced to his feet, offering her a hand.

Mikasa accepted it, and began brushing off her uniform. "That hurt," she said softly. "You're getting better."

"Nah, it's just the pads. They feel like shit if you're not wearing any."

Bert stopped paying attention. Everyone knew that Mikasa and Eren had a weird pseudo-sibling relationship, and no one really had a desire to know any more about it than that. Annie had returned to the rest of the squad, and was offering half hearted apologies.

"Let's get back to going through the choreography," she announced, before swirling a finger in the air, and turning on her heel so that her pony tail bounced. "Has everyone got mirror image down?" she asked the field. there were a chorus of "yes"s behind her. "Alright! Then lets take it from the top!"

And they did, which was pretty amazing as far as Bert was concerned, because they'd only really gone over the steps twice, and now everyone seemed to have it down. He wondered if that was something specialized to cheer.

Mikasa rejoined them four steps in seamlessly.

"How does it feel, Ladies?" Annie asked when the set was done. "What do you think about it?"

"I like it," Sasha said from the back. Ymir snickered.

"Still think it could use a little less you," Mikasa said. Annie deftly ignored the comment.

"Good," she said. "Now we can practice the lifts, and the next set."

Bert was astonished by the whole thing, and yet slightly distracted on occasion by football practice. It looked absolutely rigorous, and slightly like a fitness cult when all the players lined up before the coach, and jogged in place until he blew a whistle, and they all dropped into push ups.

He'd never been too into sports himself. In middle school he'd run track, but that had gotten in the way of his grades, and so his mother had told him it would be better to stop. Now he just swam at the Y on weekends. Sports seemed fascinating though. He watched a couple of football players get fired up after a practice run and jog in place while hitting each other on the shoulders. The whole confrontation ended with a head butt, and Bert was reminded very solidly that he came from a very different culture than any of the kids on the field.

The line of dirt that ran between the grass and the bleachers to separate them had a metaphorical counterpart made of religion, and expectation. The people before him were expected to be perfect little clones with perfect little lives, while all his mother had ever expected from him was an A-B average, and relative happiness. And those were things she was willing to help him achieve.

On the contrary, Annie was on her own. Her parents would throw money into her training, and her championships, but otherwise it was all on her head. All the trophies were carried around her neck, each one weighing her down with increased need to keep from failing as expectations swelled around her.

Had Reiner's life been like that, he wondered. Had Reiner been drowning in that same ocean of misguided parenting? Had that been part of why he acted out? Bert pressed his fingers against his lips, as he tried again to understand. Everything was so different than he'd thought it was. He felt like he was standing on the other side of the fence now that he and Annie actually spoke. Now that he was able to look into Reiner Braun's life, and get a feel for the basics of what it would entail.

Then there was the fact that he would never understand what it was like to have his parents hate something so uncontrollable as his sexuality enough to send him to a camp where they would attempt to cure it. How ostracizing would that feel?

Throughout Bert's life he'd always known that he could trust his parents to make decisions in his best interest, but Reiner and Annie couldn't.

It was quiet when he, and Annie walked towards their cars that day. Her keys jingled softly in her hand.

"Do you think your parents would turn on you the way Reiner's did?" he asked when they were about a block from school.

"Probably," she said. "But it doesn't really matter because I'm not stupid like he is, you know. If I was gonna do something gay, it certainly wouldn't be with some one who'd tell."

"Why do you think he picked me?"

"Because he's got a crush on you," she said. That hit Bert in the chest like a minivan. He remembered childish middle school thoughts about what Reiner's hands would feel like if he held onto them. They'd been twelve then. It had been almost two years before Reiner had gone fully jock crazy.

"Really?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said, rounding the corner, and stopping beside her car. "He's had a crush on you since like middle school." There was a pause as she unlocked the door, and pulled it open, in which she cocked her head. "You didn't know?"

"I thought he hated me."

Annie gave him a half smirk. "You think everyone hates you as a default."

"To be fair, he gave me plenty of reasons to think that," he countered.

"I suppose you're right," she said finally, sliding in behind the wheel, and shoving the keys into the ignition. "You need a ride home?" she asked, leg still hanging out the open door.

"No," he told her. "I'm parked on the next street over." He watched her slam the door shut, and drive away.

 

\----

 

He spent hours thinking about it. Days. Weeks. And then he tried not to think at all because it just made him feel worse.

Annie's MMA trophies shined on her bookshelf the first night she told him to come over to her house, and climb through her window. She didn't say much when she pulled him into her bed, and wrapped her legs around his waist, and he thought it would be what he wanted but it was tasteless in his mouth, and something felt off about it all.

They didn't do it vaginally, which Annie told him was the only rule as he fumbled with his belt. The only rule. He lay there afterwards, with her curled against him like a cat, and wondered what that must be like. Only having one rule about her body. It wasn't his business though. It was hers.

Her muscles were hard under his fingers, and her skin, but she was tiny. His hand wrapped half way around her waist with no effort, when he held above her hips. She made soft sounds. Quiet in all things, designed to take up the least space, and make the least impact possible. Just like every catholic school girl. Not too loud. Not to distracting.

He was distracted through the whole of it though. Distracted by thoughts of what it must have been like when she was with Reiner. Had it been the same? Had the rule applied to him? Had she held onto his shoulders the same way? Was it just as mechanical, and detached?

He could feel her ribs under his fingers, pronounced in a way he'd never expected from someone who he knew could stand up to Mikasa Ackerman. She was tiny. It made her seem delicate. He wondered at the dichotomy of her and Reiner, the difference in their builds.

"You can go home now, if you want," she said after a while, sitting up, and lighting a cigarette.

It was awkward. He had no idea how to proceed, so he just left his arm stretched out over the pillows, and kept staring at her ceiling. The room was lit by the street lights outside, and he could only really make out the outlines of her frame in any detail. The embers on the end of the cigarette helped him see her face when she inhaled.

"Won't your parents find out?" he asked.

"That I smoke?" She seemed to give it a moment of thought before shrugging. "No. I spray lysol, and it's not like they ever come in here anyway."

Bert had yet to meet Annie's mother. Annie said she worked all the time, and was rarely ever home. Her father, on the other hand, seemed to be vaguely interested in Annie's life, but only really enough to make sure that she wasn't with Bert behind closed doors.

"Anyway, you shouldn't stay 'til morning, 'cause my folks'll find you," she said. Bert nodded, and pulled his pants back on. She was quiet when he said goodbye, which he tried not to think too much about, but ended up thinking about anyway.

He wondered if they would stop speaking now, but that didn't seem to be the case the next day when she sat down across from him at lunch with her tray, and poked at her food instead of eating it. She didn't say anything about them having sex, and again he found himself wondering if this was how it had been with her and Reiner. The two of them little more than friends, half way to family, sleeping with each other in the dark, and then neglecting to mention it in the light.

He concluded that that must have been how it was. It was likely how it would be with them too. Annie was not the kind of creature to change much after all. She liked to fall into patterns, and form habits. She was ritualistic.

Bert was too, and so he saw nothing strange about it, sitting across from her without much to say from either of them as she performed her lunch time ritual of pushing food around her plate, and barely eating anything.

Why was it, he wondered, that so many girls chose to grow in while boys were encouraged to grow out? What failure of the system had inspired Annie to starve herself? She'd seemed like such a stoic, and untouchable person from afar, but now that he knew her, and watched her, he saw all the cracks in the stone that was her facade where the erosive forces of society had slipped in, and were wearing her down.

Reiner had been the reason they'd begun spending time together, but now they spent time together because the truth was they had no one else who saw the little cracks in them. Honestly, it was good to know there was someone who understood at least some of the basic parts of you.

Reiner had been gone for two and a half months. Bert counted the days with mounting guilt as he sat in on cheer practices, and overheard members of the football team complaining about how Reiner had been the factor that made their good great.

Annie and Mikasa continued to fight for dominance, and squabble at every chance they got. And continually, the football coach was the only one who could effectively get between them. Annie never spoke of that either, though. She behaved as if it were the most normal thing in the world, but looked more, and more hurt every time Mikasa threw her to the ground.

She was quiet, and unopinionated. A good little catholic girl.

"Why does Mikasa hate you?" he asked at one point, and she rolled her shoulders nonchalantly.

"She knows her little brother has a crush on me." There was a pause, they watched cars roll by the school fence. "And she has a crush on him, so," she trailed off.

Bert made a faced at the chain links, and shrugged to shift the fabric of his P.E. shirt.

"Yeah, I know. Weird, right?" she asked, turning, and leaning up against the fence's give. It wasn't any weirder than what they had going, or why they were even friends. "Hey," she said. "You wanna come over tonight?"

"Sure," he said, knowing what she was asking for, and feeling like maybe it wasn't a good idea, but not wanting to say no either.

"Man," she said, staring out over the field behind him. "I wish Reiner was here."

It was something she said every once, and a while, so he knew the routine around the comment. "Why?" he asked. She smiled softly, and cocked her head the way she did when she remembered things.

"Because sometimes when we had free P.E. days he would give me piggy back rides," she said. "It made me feel like I was tiny, because adding my weight was like adding nothing for him, y'know." Bert hummed his understanding at her, and she closed her eyes.

"Do you love him?" he asked.

She laughed. "God, no! Not like that. Don't fall in love with a homo." They lapsed back into silence for a bit. "No. Like I said. He's like my brother. I mean, Yeah, I love him, but I'm not in love with him. We just grew up together, and stuff."

Bert hummed again. "Why?" she asked then. "Do you?" He sputtered, not knowing how to respond to that.

She laughed again, and thumped against his chest softly with her knuckles. "Chill out gayby, I'm fucking with you."

"What's a gayby?"

"A gayby, you know? Like a gay baby."

Bert was astounded by her again, but chose not to say anything.


	3. Letters From Camp

They didn't get to state that year. The football team groaned, and complained that it was Reiner's absence that had done him in. The cafeteria was awash with stories about how he'd taken them there immediately upon being instated as quarterback last year. Bert sat in silence, and watched his tray. He never said a word about it. Annie didn't look at him.

Christmas came, and went. Bert turned seventeen. His parents got him a new computer, and an iPhone. He renewed his membership at the YMCA, and Annie brought home a bronze metal for cheer. She repeatedly stated that it wasn't good enough whenever it was mentioned.

His grades were good, and no one bothered him much at all anymore except for Daz on occasion. Daz wasn't much of a bother, though. He was a second string member of the football team, one of Reiner's old followers who Reiner hadn't even paid much attention to when he'd been around.

January set in with cold, and a bit of light snow melting in between falls. School came back together with an air of jitters. Boys clowned around in classes, excited to see their school friends after the long break.

Bertholdt found himself sitting next to Armin in history, which was a pleasant change, considering Thomas Wagner had been hounding him for notes all last semester. Armin at least would pull his own weight.

They didn't speak much, but he liked Armin.

Annie reported news from Reiner's parents, saying that Reiner had written them a nice letter, explaining that he was having an amazing time at camp. The letter itself was something on a whole new level of disturbing. She watched him like a hawk as he read it sitting across the table from her at a pizza place.

It talked about how great all the guys were. How everything was so normal, and the whole thing seemed to neglect to mention, or even have the decency to remember that the person writing it was being held against his will in a place meant to change his very nature.

"Somethings wrong," she told him, when he set the letter down. She was probably right. Bert had realized at this point that he had no idea who Reiner Braun actually was. That every little piece of information he had was something he had to stitch together in order to get the big picture.

It all did seem odd, but he didn't know what to tell her about that.

"He should be mad at them, not writing them happy letters that say 'love, your son'! This isn't fucking playing house!"

Bert watched silently as she pushed her soda cup away from herself, and sat back with her arms crossed. She missed him. Bert wondered how often she thought about how she missed him. Did it keep her up at night, knowing that she wouldn't be able to call him on the phone, and talk to him about nothing, or hang out at the bowling alley wearing his letterman jacket?

"That idiot," she muttered under her breath. "I hate him so much."

Bert took a sip of his soda, and re-read the letter, wondering if there was some hidden code in it. Maybe Reiner was that smart. He didn't know. Reiner was an enigmatic force that baffled him with it's absent strangeness. If there was, he assumed that Annie would have found it by now. She seemed to know the contents of the letter well enough.

"Maybe he wrote this, knowing you'd get it," Bert told her.

"No. I'd know if he had. He would have left clues if he had. This is legitimately for them."

"Maybe someone else wrote it."

Annie leaned forward, pulling the letter down, and pointing to the word "running" in the middle of the first paragraph. "You see the little tail on that 'i' right there?" she asked. Bert nodded. "That's Reiner's hand writing. only Reiner writes his 'i's with little tails on them like that. It's because he gets too ahead of himself, and puts the pen down before he should. It drove our kindergarten teacher insane."

Bert stared at the hand writing, memorized the way Reiner had written his own name in hard, looping squiggles at the bottom of the page, followed the lines of "Dear Mom and Dad" over, and over. Nothing was out of place. Not a single strand of the paper's weave seemed off. It was all perfect. Too perfect. It made him uneasy.

"Dear Mom and Dad," he read again. "Camp sure is fun." It didn't sound like the bully that had tormented him, and it didn't sound like the middle schooler who'd needed help with math. "I've made really good friends here. The boy I share a room with reminds me of Berik a lot." Bert stopped, and re-read that line.

"Berik was the kid who got his by a car, and died in sixth grade right?"

"Yeah," Annie said, like it was nothing. "Why?"

"Why is Reiner talking about him here?"

"Because he was Reiner's best friend. The three of us used to hang out together all the time."

Bert remembered that. He remembered Reiner being pulled out of school for two weeks to cope with the loss. He hadn't thought much about it then. They hadn't spoken at that point. Bert hadn't really spoken to anyone at that point. It had been right after he transferred into St Maria's Elementary.

Reiner had never shown a hint of grief though. Bert hadn't realized it at the time, but now it seemed odd for an eleven-year-old boy to not be effected by the death of his best friend in any way.

"What exactly happened?" he asked.

Annie pursed her lips, and poked at the pizza on the plate in front of her. "They were walking home from school when a car hit a patch of ice, and spun out of control. Berik pushed Reiner out of the way."

"Did Reiner tell you that?"

"No," she said. "Reiner never talks about Berik." There was a moment of silence, as it dawned on her that something was even more wrong than she originally thought. "Why is he talking about Berik?" she asked, snatching up the letter.

Bert watched as her wide eyes scanned over the paper frantically.

"Here, he mentions him again!" she said. "I think Berik would be proud of all the effort I'm putting in, and how I've changed as a person," she read, glaring at the paper.

He didn't know what to say. Honestly he felt like the whole affair was none of his business, and there was still the vague possibility that it really was just a football camp. He wouldn't say that though. The last time he'd said that Annie had punched his clavicle so hard his mother had given him the safe sex talk because it looked like a hickey.

"What do I do?" she asked the paper, before she dropped it on the table, and pushed it away as she had her drink.

Bert didn't have an answer for her, so he let it fall in to rhetoric.

\-----

Reiner's parents continued to behave as if there was nothing strange going on at all when Annie tried to ask about it. Annie became more and more distressed the longer Reiner was away. Bert noticed it in the little things, those little hitches in Annie's mask.

Winter rolled into spring, gone with the news of who had won state instead of St Maria's Titans. Bert found himself actually speaking to Armin on a regular basis. Which lead to him sort of making friends with Eren, and some of the other football players. Which in turn meant he ended up rubbing elbows with Mikasa, something Annie vehemently disagreed with while some how managing not to say a single outward thing about it.

That was when he first wondered if maybe there was a possibility of her thinking of him as her boyfriend. It was a thought that was simultaneously nice, and horrifying.

The rumors of their status as lovers had stopped flying in ironic fashion due to the fact that now they sort of were. Annie ignored all of it. None of it seemed to matter to her. She was above it. She was above everything. She floated on air far above gossip.

Bert was sort of jealous. He wanted to have the kind of power she had when it came to just not listening to anyone else.

Finals crept up, and dragged them under currents of paper work. Annie began training for MMA. She would be going up against Mikasa early in the season, and needed to be buffed up before summer, she said. She must have gained six pounds in muscle. Bert was astounded.

Summer rolled up like a tidal wave of low expectations, and attempting to find a part time job in a terrible job economy. Bert slouched into it with his final report card, and rewards for his hard work.

'A's, and 'B's faded into obscurity, with the prospect of college looming on the horizon ever closer. He managed to get a job working at Jack in the Box. Annie spent almost all of her time lounging around, buying chicken sandwiches, and curly fries. Armin came by on occasion.

For once, he was a normal teenager doing normal teenager things. He didn't feel good about it when he was alone though. Every time he thought about how he'd gotten to where he was, and realized that the turning point had been ruining someone's life. Everything was bitter sweet.

He made more money than he expected to. He was able to preorder a few video games he wanted, pay some of his car insurance.

Annie paid for his tickets to see her fight, and she really did kick ass and take names. She brought home another trophy and set it on her dresser with the other ones.

And before he knew it, it was August. It was August first, and Annie told him she didn't want to go anywhere.

"Why not?" he asked.

She was sitting on her bed, staring at the calendar on the wall. "It's August first," she said as if that explained everything.

"What about it?" he asked, because he already knew the date, but didn't understand the significance.

"It's Reiner's birthday," she said, hand leaned heavily on her palm, elbow propped on her knee.

Bert sucked in a hard breath of air, and shuffled his feet, looking behind him down the hallway. He couldn't close the door without pissing her father off, which made discussing Reiner risky.

"He'd said something about wanting to drive out into the middle of nowhere, and get drunk," she said to the wall as if she were talking to someone a million miles away. "I was kind of looking forward to it."

He could tell she was upset, but she wasn't showing it. All she was showing was the ghost of disappointment. "Do you wanna do that anyway?" he asked.

She looked over her shoulder at him, and nodded softly. "Yeah, whatever."

So they did drive out into the middle of nowhere. It was dark by the time they found a good place, and parked, pulling out a six pack of beer, and climbing up onto the hood of Bert's stupid old truck to stare at the stars.

She talked about all the things she and Reiner had done together. How sometimes they'd just get in the car, and go, and try to forget about home. How once he'd gotten so drunk he threw up in a trash can at the local faire, and it had looked like he was trying to find his lost watch or something because he had to stick his head through the flap to do it.

She laughed, but it wasn't a happy laugh. It was more something rueful.

"He's turning eighteen right now," she said after a moment of quiet, when her face had fallen from a half smile into her normal, placid mask. "I should have been there. It should have been something so big, and rad. We were gonna make eighteen matter, you know?" she said it like nothing had ever mattered before. "It's like the first step to being out from under our parents. He was so excited. Every time we talked about it, he would smile, and his toes would start going inside his shoes, you know?"

Bert tried to imagine it. He'd seen Reiner smile before, but he severely doubted that he had ever seen him truly excited.

"I was excited too," she said then, sighing as she leaned back against the windshield, and took another sip of beer. "He was gonna be the first one to have that freedom. I thought maybe it would be enough for him to stop lying to me about shit, you know?"

They lapsed into another silence in a series of many. Bert stared at the highway beside them. "When is he coming back?" he asked.

"His parents said he'll be back in time for school," she told him.

"Well that's pretty soon, isn't it?"

"Yeah," she said softly. "Still."

He got it. He understood that it sucked. He almost felt it right along with her, but he knew it was different. There was dread in his feeling about the whole situation. How bad would it be when Reiner came back? What kind of revenge would he want?

"He's never gonna just be him, now, you know?" she said then.

It made him feel sick, thinking about that.

"He's just gonna hate it even more, and try even harder to be normal. I know him. He always tries so fucking hard, and now it'll just be that much harder for him to realize it'll never work."

Bert tightened is fingers on the neck of the bottle in his hand, trying to strangle it to death.

"It's not your fault, you know?" she said then. "How is it your fault?"

He opened his mouth to tell her, but she smacked the butt of her bottle hard into his shoulder. "Isn't it supposed to be different, though? Shouldn't it be like, you tell you parents, and they hug you, and say it'll be alright, and they'll always be there, instead of yelling, and throwing things, and talking about how ungrateful you must be after all they've given you?"

He thought about that. He thought of Reiner cowering against a wall as glass shattered around him, and someone shouted. He imagined it, and then quickly told himself that it hadn't been like that. It couldn't have been nearly so bad.

Annie pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket, and unfolded it. "This is the letter he sent me when he first got there," she said to the page. "I was so scared," she said, like she was admitting the worst secret in the world. "He talked about orientation, and how his roommate was raving nuts. He told me he didn't know what to do, because he knew he'd go that route if he didn't get out, but if he did get out, he'd have nowhere to go. His parents would be livid if he turned up on their door step, after all. So he stayed."

She trailed off softly as Bert realized that she really had known he'd wound up in camp this whole time. "I didn't know if I should tell you or not, because I knew you were feeling guilty about it already, but he told me what it was like when he told his dad. He didn't get it, you know, because they made him. They decided, and they brought him into the world, but they never asked him if he wanted to be born, you know?" She pointed to a paragraph in the center of the page. "He said they were the ones who owed him. Or that's how it should be."

"I think he's right," Bert said. Annie nodded. "Does he say anything about me?"

"No," she said. "I don't think it was really on his mind, you know?"

Bert grunted an acknowledgement of that. "There's only one more month," he said then. "And then you can celebrate his birthday like nothing ever happened."

"Yeah," she whispered to the letter. It hissed as she folded it back over it's own words until it was a tiny square that fit into her pocket like it had only ever been meant to. He supposed it had.

"And he'll be fine," Bert told her, even though he knew it was a lie.

She nodded all the same though.


	4. A Tale Of Two Reiners

School started again.

Bert sat in his car, pushing his fingers against his lips nervously. Annie had said Reiner would be home in time for school. That meant that he was back.

Bert hadn't seen Annie much at all for the last week of summer. He'd assumed it was because she was at Reiner's house, helping him settle back in, but he hadn't heard anything about it. Now, he felt like everything that had been mounting for the last year had come to a head.

Likely, it would just go back to how it was. Likely, there would be nothing to worry about, and he would just end up the pariah again. He took a deep breath to see if it would calm his nerves, but it didn't.

Nothing did, really, so he just went to school nervous, glad that he'd packed extra shirts and deodorant because he was likely going to sweat through what he had on.

He didn't see Reiner for the first half of the day, which was relieving. It was only during lunch, when Annie sat down across from him as per usual that Reiner showed his face. It had been two, and a half weeks short of a year since he'd last seen the other boy, but in all honesty, not much had changed.

Bert somehow didn't notice him before he'd sat down and begun speaking.

"Hey, Annie, this where you sit now?" was the first thing that alerted him to the sudden danger he was in. He looked up to see her nod plainly, and found he wasn't really able to look at Reiner directly. He chose instead to watch the former quarterback out of the corner of his eye.

Reiner turned his attention onto Bert anyway. "So you're Bertholdt, right?" he asked, as if they'd never actually been introduced before.

Bert looked at him, and was astounded to see that there was absolutely no recognition in his face. Annie shrugged when he tried desperately to get answers from her without saying a word.

"Annie talks about you a lot. You two an item now?"

Bert shook his head vehemently.

"S'alright, I'm not gonna bite you," Reiner said. He took a moment to be distracted by the food on his tray, pushing his salad around with a fork like he wasn't interested in it, before offering it to Annie. She exchanged her entree for it as if this was a common thing. "Can I just call you Bertl?"

Bert frowned at the odd shortening. "Most people call me Bert," he said.

Reiner shrugged as if 'most people' didn't apply to him in any circumstance, and took a bite of the macaroni the cafeteria was supplying that day. Bert tried to focus on his sandwich, but it was hard with Reiner just causally existing across the table from him like nothing was wrong.

Armin eventually came over fresh off the lunch line, and made himself a cozy little seat next to Bert. "Mikasa and Eren are fighting again, so they're sitting on opposite ends of the cafeteria, and I'm not picking sides," he said when Bert asked where they were.

"Hey, Reiner," he said then, as if the two of them were well acquainted, which he supposed they may have been. Eren had hung out with Reiner a bit for the first few weeks of his freshman year before Reiner had been shipped off.

"Hey, little buddy," Reiner returned. "How're your grades?"

"Oh, they're great. I spent most of last year studying with Bert," Armin said.

Reiner nodded at Bert as though he greatly approved of this information. "Can I get back into your study group?" he asked Armin then. "I'm a bit rusty, and I don't think anyone's smarter than you."

"Of course," Armin said, smiling at his lunch as if he was embarrassed by the praise. It was true though. No one in school was smarter than Armin, and they all knew it, even if he hated having it pointed out.

"Rad," Reiner said, before turning to Annie. "You should come to. I'll be like a really quiet party."

"Meh," was all she had to put into the conversation. She was upset. Reiner seemed to notice, but he didn't say anything about it.

"So how's Eren doing? He still busting through linebackers like it's his calling in life?"

"He is," Armin said. "He's bummed that he didn't get to play under you last year though. They had Thomas take over as team captain, and Jean fill in as quarterback, but everyone just kept saying it wasn't the same. You going to try, and get your old position back?"

Reiner looked at Armin as if he'd grown three extra heads, and burnt the cafeteria down. "Am I gonna try?" he asked. "Armin, what in the seven hells do you think I would do if I didn't?"

Armin laughed. "I guess you're right. You not playing football would be like birds deciding not to fly."

It was an accurate assessment.

Jean and Marco sat down next to Reiner, and were quickly followed by Thomas, Daz, and Nack. Which was how Bert found himself sitting at the cool kid's table, surrounded by football students talking about the last season, and griping on Reiner about how he'd cut out on them. He watched Marco and Jean eat off each other's plates, and punch at each other half heartedly, and found himself annoyingly close to Connie who liked to talk with his hands.

It was amazing to watch actual extroverts deftly navigate conversation. It looked like Reiner was born to handle small talk. Annie moped next to him, even when he tucked her under his arm, and gave her a little half hug.

Lunch ended rather quickly though, and just as they'd come, the football team quickly dispersed, leaving Bertholdt to be followed by Reiner, and Annie to history class.

He tried to keep out of sight the rest of the day, finally exiting classes only to find Annie waiting where she always waited for him after school, Reiner Braun right beside her, leaning up against the tree that provided her shade from the end-of-Summer heat that still lingered in the air.

He was wearing his letterman jacket. He looked like a bad idea with warnings written over his face to obscure the features of who he actually was behind the guise of a meaningless bully. Bertholdt ducked his head and tried not to make eye contact.

They must have been glued at the hip. When Annie moved, Reiner moved, always a bit behind her, as if backing her up, letting her know silently that she called the shots, and his fists delivered on them. Bert was surprised to realize that he had never seen them together up close before. It had always been across the football field, or a crowded hallway.

It wasn't how he had imagined it. They were like the only two silver fish that had been separated off their school by hungry dolphins. In some way they were alone and weak, but at the same time their iridescent second skins made them seem threatening. Become the expectation, and no one will see reality coming. It was such a good defense. They were quietly unaware of their genius though. He chose not to enlighten them.

"Walk me to my car," Annie said. It was not a request. Bert did as he was told without arguing.

Reiner walked on the other side of her, never directly engaging Bertholdt. Perhaps it was because he had caught on already to the fact that Bert and Annie had been sexual, and their status as men who had both slept with the same woman was strange for him. Bert didn't know.

In any case, he continued to behave as though he were completely unaware of the two years of abuse he had inflicted. It was driving Bert crazy. Was this some act? Was this some cruel prank Annie was going along with, or was this reality? Maybe things at camp had been so bad- He didn't let himself finish the thought. There was no way it had been that bad.

Reiner talked about football, and try outs in three days. He complained that he knew he was good, but that never stopped him from being nervous. "What if they found someone better?" he asked, moving his hands when he spoke, and tilting his chin toward the sky.

Bert noticed that he liked to look up. Dreamers, and those prone to flights of fancy were the kind of people to look up. Reiner must have looked strange, the only optimist walking along with two pessimists.

"What if they replaced me?" he continued as if it were even possible for that to have happened. Bert had been to the games. He had begrudgingly admitted to seeing Reiner's abilities long ago.

Annie let him talk until he'd worn himself thin of conversation, and dropped off into silence, watching her and Bert walk.

"So talk to me," he said then. Bert looked up, to see he was addressing Annie, which was honestly a relief. "Why are you mad? What did I do?"

"Not now," Annie said, sticking to the cold shoulder rule of only three letters per vocalized word. Bert looked at the grass creeping out from under the fence beside them, followed the line where it met the concrete with his eyes as he walked.

"You clearly don't care what Bertl over there knows," Reiner argued. Bert was almost surprised he wasn't called something more preposterous like Sherbert Fruitbar, or the like.

"It's not important, Reiner," she said. It looked more and more like a soap opera, or some TV drama about high schoolers. Reiner always made Bert think of Glee, it seemed.

"Annie, I know you," he pleaded, another thing that Bert had never had the pleasure of seeing before.

"I don't want to talk about it," she told him, never once deigning to look his way. Reiner gave up, shooting Bert a look over her head, almost like he was plotting something.

Bert understood in an instant that he would be seeing more of the boy. An unfortunate turn of events, really.

 

\----

 

It took three days for Reiner Braun to show up at his house. It was right after football tryouts. Bert could tell because Reiner had just showered. His hair was still slightly damp.

His mother eyed the boy on the porch from behind him, and Bert felt increasing dread begin to gnaw at his stomach.

"Can I come in?" Reiner asked.

Bert felt his foot begin to move backwards of it's own accord, and stopped it dead halfway through the motion. He didn't want to speak to Reiner one on one before he got to talk to Annie about the clear problems they were now facing. That didn't seem to be an option though.

"Sure," he said, moving out of the way, and cursing his inability to lie.

"Mind if we talk in private?" Reiner asked, eyeing Bert's mother the way she was eyeing him.

"Why?" she asked. Bert held up a hand to stop her, but she pushed it away. "Is there something important going on, Bert?"

"He's from school, mom," Bert said.

"Is he your boyfriend?" she asked.

Reiner was wide eyed, and looked half terrified. Maybe he'd just realized that Bert's sexuality was suspect and was about to make some hasty excuses to leave. "I'm not his boyfriend, Mrs. Hoover. Our friend is just having some trouble right now, and I have no idea why she's mad at me, so I was hoping Bertl did."

Bert rubbed his hand hard over his face at the continued use of the nickname. "Yeah, sure we can talk in private," Bert said, pointing him up the stairs, and following him up, glaring at his mother over his shoulder. She was going to listen at the door, he knew it.

"You're house is pretty big," Reiner said when Bert had closed the door to his room. He'd shrugged out of his letterman jacket, and draped it over his forearm. It was weird seeing him out of uniform. Bert wasn't sure whether or not he liked it.

"Yeah," he said moving the clutter on his desk into neater piles to occupy his time while he waited for Reiner to stop toeing around the eggshells on the metaphorical floor.

"Bigger than mine. I mean my house is pretty alright, but-" It was the first time Bert had ever seen Reiner feel awkward. It annoyed him.

He dropped a book harder than he meant to, and turned on his heel to look at the other boy.

"What do you want?" he snapped.

Reiner jumped a bit, and for a moment Bert felt like a fierce predator that had finally managed to corner a moose.

"I was just worried about Annie, and you two seemed to have gotten close, so I wanted to ask if she'd said anything about it. Because when I first came back she was happy to see me, and then the longer we talked the more upset she seemed, and there are things that just aren't lining up with how I remember them, so I'm really confused here."

Bert took a deep breath, and tried to remember that Reiner Braun wasn't just a figure of torment. He was a person. They were all just people, and deep down at their core, humans had the capacity to display empathy. Reiner was displaying empathy. Reiner was worried about Annie. Reiner was human.

"I don't know," Bert said. "I haven't really spoken to her since you came back."

Reiner looked like a balloon that had a small hole in it the way he deflated then. The nervous energy bled out of him, replaced with bitter resignment. "Fuck," he said to the ceiling. Bert watched the curve of his throat as he swallowed, and took note of the positioning of his converse on the rug on the floor.

His hand was fisted at his side. Bert saw his fingernails bite into the heel of his palm before his arm went slack.

"I hate it when she does this. I mean, I get it. No one at home talks, but we can talk, you know? That's the point of us."

It was real emotion. Candid, and raw. Bert had never expected it. "Yeah," he said to the foot of his bed, looking away from the other boy because he didn't need to know any more.

"I just wish she'd tell me what I'm doing wrong, you know?" Reiner told him. "I mean I'd do anything for her, right? She's like my sister. I'll stop doing whatever if she'll tell me. She knows that."

"Why are you telling me this?" Bert asked.

Reiner shrugged. "I just get the feeling I like you for some reason," he said like it was that simple. "You seem trustworthy."

Bert thought about the picture on his cellphone, and cringed inwardly. It really was a cruel trick, but it wasn't one Reiner was a part of. Reiner had just become a puppet of the universal three fold rule. Bert chewed on the inside of his cheek, before he pointed to the bed, and asked, "You wanna sit down, and talk about it?"

Reiner looked at the bed, and then back to Bert before sighing, and slouching down onto it.

It was Dharma to fix your mistakes, after all.

"It all seems so stupid," Reiner said to his hands, fisted around each other between his knees.

"Doesn't everything if you look at it the right way?" Bert asked.

Reiner smiled, and glanced up at him. "Yeah. Yeah, I suppose that's pretty accurate."

In that moment, Bert really wanted to like Reiner. He really did, but something stopped him from it, held up his feet, and tripped him on all the things that Reiner had done. He tried to remember that it was different right now, but found it hard.

"I just feel like you'll laugh, you know? You've probably got worse problems than I do," he said. Bert was astonished by the modesty of a boy who had watched his best friend get killed in a car crash at eleven-years-old, and then realized he was gay, living in a home where his parents were so homophobic they sent him to a conversion camp when he was forced to tell them on someone else's terms.

"I doubt it," Bert told him.

Reiner shrugged.

"She's just the only person in the world who actually knows me, you know?" Reiner said to his hands. "I just don't know what I'd do if I fucked things up so badly between us I couldn't fix them. I need to fix them, you know? I can't really go at it without her."

Bert had known they were close, but he'd never imagined he'd seen Reiner honestly admitting to needing a tiny woman who he wasn't even really dating. Reiner was a sexist, homophobic dick. That was how Bert remembered him.

"It's stupid because I'm right here, but I still miss her," he added.

Bert sat down next to him, and stared at the doors of his closet.

"Thanks man," Reiner said after a long moment of silence that consisted of Bert looking straight ahead instead of bothering to acknowledge the other boy.

"For what?" Bert asked.

"For- Shit, I don't know. I guess thanks for letting me sit on your bed, and whine at you like some child," Reiner told him. "It means a lot, you know?" Bert felt the other boy's hand land firmly on the back of his shoulder. He almost shied away from the contact before he realized that it was friendly.

The hand quickly found it's way around to his other side, the arm it was attached to synching up around Bert to pull him into a hug. It was a football player's hug. From the side, but still crushing, with "no homo" written all over it in neon letters.

"We're friends now, okay?" Reiner said against the side of Bert's head.

"Really?"

"Yeah," Reiner told him. "We're friends because you held out your hand to me. That's important. Not enough people are able to hold out their hands to those around them these days."

Bert stared at Reiner's thighs, and wondered where this nice boy had been a year ago. Maybe if this nice boy had been around a year ago, he wouldn't have made the mistakes he did.

"I gotta go," Reiner said, still holding around Bert's neck in half a choke hold that had no intention to choke him. "I'll see you at school tomorrow."

"Wait a minute," Bert said, when he moved to get up. "You had try outs today, did you get your old position back?"

Reiner turned, and looked at him, face splitting into a huge grin. "Hell yeah!" he said. "Thanks for asking."

Bert watched him leave, saying he'd be fine finding the door on his own. Bert listened as he galloped down the stairs on deceptively light feet, and opened the front door.

He leaned back on the bed, and stared at the ceiling. What had happened? What wasn't he seeing now? What pieces of the puzzle was he missing? Could Annie help?

He rolled over, and buried his face in the comforter, trying to think.

On one hand, he had the Reiner he had known, who had known him. The one who had tortured him, and called him names, and forced him out of the socially acceptable into a weird kind of emotional banishment. On the other, he had the Reiner who didn't know him. The one that was kind, and caring, and attentive to Annie's desires. The one who was grateful for every service done to him by others, and said thank you often.

What was the link? What was the reason?

He reached for his cellphone, and called Annie.

"Reiner just went over to your house, didn't he?" she asked the minute he said he wanted to ask her something. Bert bit his lip.

"Yeah," he said.

"Of course he did. He wants to know why I'm mad at him."

"Why are you mad at him?"

Annie sighed long, and hard on the other end of the line. "I'm not mad at him so much as I'm mad about him, and I can't look at his stupid face without wanting to burn puppies, or something," she said.

"Oh."

"Yeah. Anyway, I'm betting you wanna know why he's weird."

"It'd be nice, yes," Bert said, turning over to look at the ceiling again.

"Best I could come up with is that he got so over taxed at camp, he just blocked out everything having to do with it. That seems to include you, B-T-dubs."

"Oh," Bert said again.

"I'm trying to fix it, but I don't wanna like shock him, you know? If it was that bad over a period of time, can you imagine how bad it would be to remember it all at once?"

Bert agreed. Her assessment seemed very thoughtful.

"So what do we do?" he asked.

"I'm thinking I need to get over being mad about the whole thing so we can just pretend everything's normal for a while. I was reading this psychology book, and it said that with time, and a safe space, everything should clear up."

"Shouldn't we seek help from a professional?" Bert asked.

"No. No! God no! Are you crazy?"

"No, I just think this is a little beyond our abilities as-"

"It doesn't matter! We don't have the luxury of paying hundreds of dollars to pawn this off on somebody. This is on us. We had hands in this after all. It is our mess to clean up."

"How did you have a hand in this?" Bert asked.

"Well I never stopped him from torturing you, did I?"

He supposed she had a point.

"Alright," he said. "Everything's normal."

"Exactly," she said. "Everything's normal, and we aren't going to point it out to him. We're gonna let him notice on his own. It'll be easier for him that way."

Bert didn't think it would be easy no matter what they did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter five is also done, and waiting to be edited. Chapter six is in the works, but I'm taking a break to work on my other Bert/Reiner fic, and my Erwin/Levi fic, so it may be a bit of a wait after five is up.


	5. Toy Trucks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finished the chapter for the other fic early, so chapter six of this is done now. Guess you don't have to worry about waiting much longer. It'll probably be up by Friday.

Reiner kept sitting with them at lunch. Bert was quiet through the whole thing as the football team gathered around him day after day. Eventually, he started to make friends with them. They started to just accept him, and if anyone asked why Bertholdt was suddenly sitting with Reiner at lunch, it was far away from where Bert could hear them.

Largely it was treated as a non-issue. The first football game of the season was right around the corner, and the whole team was in killer shape. Bert found himself watching them more and more when he sat in on cheer practice.

Reiner had a habit of leading the boys into silly little stunts where they'd mock the girls. Without context it looked a bit like a mating dance between him and Annie, when Annie would poke fun back, but Bert now had insight into the fact that this was just how they played around.

He wanted, for the first time, to be a part of it. They seemed to be having so much fun. Reiner made the grueling practice a game for them in a way Levi hadn't managed. He was high energy, and encouraging. He took time to talk to people when they were having problems, and patted them on the back, always there with a witty comment, and a comeback, but never actually telling anything important about himself.

All anyone seemed to know was what he let them. He was almost a harder case to crack than Annie.

Bert assumed it was because he was currently brainwashing himself into believing he was his persona.

The day after they won the first game of the season, Reiner asked Bert and Annie out to the bowling alley. "Just the three of us," he said happily, as if Bert had been fully accepted into his inner circle.

"Sure," Bert had said when Annie had given him a sharp look. He'd been planning to study that night. There was a math test coming up, and he wasn't sure he was going to pass given the fact that he'd suddenly gotten so distracted by Reiner, and Annie, and football. How did Reiner manage B's while bringing home the state title? Bert didn't understand it.

They all piled into Reiner's truck, Annie sitting in the center of the bench in the front seat, nestled safe beneath Reiner's arm. It smelled like bubblegum air freshener, and the football gear in the near non existent backseat, but Bert didn't say anything. Annie didn't seem to mind. In fact, she seemed quiet content.

Reiner drove one handed like he didn't care if they got into an accident. Annie laughed every time he swerved suddenly to scare Bert. Eventually, the drive culminated with the invention of a game where Reiner shouted "stop!", every time they hit a stop sign, and "go!" every time they continued. Annie was in stitches by the time they got there, holding onto her sides, and leaning up against Reiner.

Bert had never seen her laugh so hard in his life. He didn't really understand it, but he supposed he was having fun too. Reiner held the door for both of them, and paid for pizza before they actually decided on what they wanted to do.

"Two options," he said, holding out his hands. "On my right we have the arcade, and on my left we have bowling. I'm leaving it up to you to choose."

They decided to fuck around in the arcade at Annie's behest. She didn't like bowling much, which was hilarious because this was her usual hang out spot. Bert was grateful anyway. He saw a few of Reiner's teammates down at the lanes, and didn't really want to deal with them right then.

Annie was still in her cheer uniform and, standing next to Reiner in his letterman jacket, they looked like they were straight out of the fifties or something. It was surreal to be there with both of them, still in his school clothes. He felt like he was set apart by the differing colors of school spirit.

Reiner challenged him to a game of air hockey, and slung casual insults across the table every time Bert scored a goal. It was all in good humor, though. They were insults Bert hadn't ever had directed at him by Reiner before. Insults like "you baby faced ass hat," and "you mother's so fat…". Bert failed to find them actually inflammatory in any way, which seemed to be the point, because when Bert won, Reiner grabbed him into another one of those side hugs, and nooggied him while dragging him over to a racing game.

"You up for another round, tall guy?" he asked, tossing Bert a few tokens.

"Tall guy?"

"Yeah," Reiner told him. "You're taller than me." there was a pause where Reiner smiled at him. "I like it. I don't have any other friends that are taller than me."

Reiner beat him, and then insisted on a rematch at skiball.

Annie spent her time on DDR, challenging Reiner to a game when Bert beat him again.

"You guys are killing my ego," he joked when Annie beat him as well.

They probably spent an hour and a half there, wasting money before they were all funned out, and climbed back into the car laughing.

"I'm not ready to go home yet," Reiner said, even though it was dark out.

"Drive me somewhere," Annie told him.

So Reiner drove them around aimlessly. Bert felt himself melting into the seat by the time they turned off the highway in the middle of nowhere, and Reiner killed the engine, leaving them to sit in the dark, in a field far away from everything else.

"I don't want to go home," Reiner said again after a while.

"Why?" Annie asked.

"Because they're gonna be there waiting for me." He was talking about his parents. "They've been so weird since I go back from camp. They've always got an eye on me. It's like they don't trust me anymore."

"Parents are like that though," Annie said. "They only ever get weird about you doing the wrong thing when you're doing the right thing."

"I understand it," Reiner said. "I'm in my senior year now, I've gotta start shaping up. I can't be doing shit like this all the time anymore. I need to be focusing on football, and grades, and finding a girl I can take home, you know?"

"Yeah," Annie said. It seemed like a lot to think about.

"I was thinking about getting serious about Krista," Reiner told the windshield.

Bert felt Annie stiffen minutely beside him.

"Why?" she asked.

"Why not? She's cute. She's funny. She'd be a great mother."

"I just don't think you two have much of a connection. Not to mention you'd have the same problem as a dog breeder who's stud rottweiler got at that chihuahua that was in heat."

Reiner glared at her.

"You're a mastiff, and she's a pomeranian, Reiner. Sure, she'd make a good mother if she lived to actually raise the kid. Imagine mother fucking Goliath ripping out of your tinie-tiny hoo-ha like it's fucking Alien in here."

Bert snickered at the imagery. Reiner sighed hard.

"Why do you always gotta be like that?" he asked. "It's like every time I try to get happy-"

"Because you won't be happy," Annie argued. "That's not you. That's the person you're pretending to be, I know it's hard to tell sometimes, I have trouble too, but that's why we stick up for each other."

Reiner sneered at the steering wheel, before turning the ignition. "I guess," he said over the rev of the engine firing back to life.

"What do you think, Bert?" he asked as he pulled back onto the road.

"Well, I guess I'd ask you why you're thinking about getting serious about Krista," Bert told him, staring out the window as they moved. "Are you doing it because you want to, or because you think it's what is expected?"

Reiner breathed a short note through his nose. "Chill out Socrates," he joked. Annie punched him lightly in the shoulder.

"You asked him," she said. "It's a good answer too."

"Yeah. Smart and tall, Bert just keeps getting better, and better."

\----

"When are you two gonna get married?" Reiner asked Bert over the lunch table. Annie was absent that day, and the rest of the football team had yet to show up.

Bert sputtered in the direction of the little milk carton he'd scored off the food line. "Me and Annie?" he asked incredulously. Reiner nodded emphatically. "We're not. It's not like that. I mean, we're friends is all."

"Yeah, but the two of you have fucked," Reiner observed astutely. Bert pressed his palm against Reiner's face, and shoved him back across the table, earning a chuckle. "Aw come on, Bertl."

"It's just Bert. Stop calling me that. I'm afraid it'll catch on."

"Aw come on, I like it. Bertl sounds nice doesn't it?"

"No!" Bert hissed at him. "No, I hate it."

"Does that mean you hate me?" Reiner asked with a mock pout. A year ago the answer would have been a flat "yes", but now, Bert found himself stopping, and thinking about it. Despite everything that had happened between him, and the Reiner he'd known, Bert quite liked this Reiner.

"No," he said softly to his food, poking at it with the spork he'd been provided.

Reiner's hand came soaring across the table top, catching him by the shoulder. "I like you too, buddy," he said happily. Bert stared at him.

He opened his mouth to say something, when Jean sat down heavily beside him, and groaned. The conversation petered out after that, Reiner distracted by his team, and Bert retreating back into his social shell with the feeling that things were lining up to go absolutely horribly.

He didn't say anything when Reiner chose to hang out with him because he was choosing to hang out with him rather than because Annie already was. It was weird, walking to his car after school with just Reiner talking about how Eren was really coming into his own as a player.

"He just keeps getting better, you know?" he said, "I love watching people get better at stuff. It's amazing."

"Yeah," Bert agreed,

"What are you good at?" Reiner asked him then.

"Studying, I guess," Bert told him.

"You can't really get any better at studying though, can you?"

"You can, it's just not very exciting."

"Well you've gotta have some talent."

"I'm a pretty good swimmer, and I'm pretty fast," Bert supplied.

Reiner looked him up, and down. "Yeah, you would be." There was a slow moment of quiet before Reiner looked up at the sky. "You wanna come over?" he asked.

Bert looked at him really hard for a moment. Not for the first time since being told not to tell Reiner out right about shit he didn't remember, Bert wanted to just drop on him that he'd used to beat him up for alleged homosexuality. He didn't. Instead he shrugged, and said, "Sure I guess."

Again, he found himself in Reiner's truck, squished up against the door to take up as little space possible, with the other boy driving one handed. Reiner turned on music. Classic rock. It suited him.

"My mom's probably home by now. She likes to go out shopping on Thursdays. Get groceries, and all that," Reiner said.

"Does your mom work?" Bert asked.

"No," Reiner said. "She quit working when she got pregnant with me. She was a waitress before that. Not much of a job to go back to, I suppose."

Bert hummed.

"Well anyway, the fridge is full if you're hungry," Reiner continued.

Reiner's place wasn't that far. The truck found itself idling out by the curb before Reiner put it to sleep, and stepped out.

His mother was in the kitchen making food when they came through the door. "Brought a friend over," Reiner said by way of greeting. Mrs. Braun turned around with a smile that quickly fell away when she saw Bert standing beside her son. "We're gonna go play video games," Reiner continued.

"No closed doors," his mother said sharply.

Reiner laughed. "God mom, he's not some girl I picked up at a party. Chill out."

Bert realized that Reiner had no idea what so ever why his mother was being strange. She called him into the kitchen for a moment, and Bert stood strangely in the living room as the door swung shut.

"It's just that we can never be sure if your therapy worked," she said in a hushed tone.

"What therapy, mom? Everything's fine."

"Just keep your hands to yourself, alright?"

"I will sheesh, It's not like I'm gonna strangle him to death. I learned not to fight in kindergarten."

Bert doubted that last line, but let it go when Reiner came back out of the kitchen shaking his head. "Come on," he said softly, giving Bert a bit of a berth when he passed by him. "She's being weird again."

"What's up?" Bert asked softly once they were seated comfortably on Reiner's bed with the door wide open.

"She's treating me like I'm some sort of serial murderer. Not to be left alone with anyone because I'm dangerous. Fuck."

Bert stared at the television on Reiner's desk as the other boy turned it on, and handed him a controller. Rumble Roses. Bert should have guessed it would be some weirdly misogynistic Japanese fighting game.

Reiner explained the controls to him, and picked a girl in a red sports bra, and shorts that were so small on her they couldn't be buttoned.

"So what are you interested in going to college for?" Reiner asked when he'd kicked Bert's ass a third time.

"I was thinking psychology, or law, or something," Bert told him. "What about you?"

"I've got no idea. My parents want me to go to business school, and be realistic, but it's always kind of been my dream to go pro, you know?"

"You should," Bert told him. "You're good enough."

"Aw shucks," Reiner said while putting Bert's character into a humiliation hold.

They ended up just talking at some point. The video game sat forgotten in Reiner's Xbox, and they just chatted about stupid things. Girls, prom, dates. Football, cheer squad, sports.

Bert talked about being a social outcast. Reiner told him the feeling of never fitting in didn't go away even when you did.

Reiner talked about lies. He was good at lying. He was one of the best liars he knew. He spun half truths around themselves, and made webs for other people to fall into, and never got his stories mixed up. Bert was amazed by how easy he made it seem.

"The trick is to always tell the truth about the little stuff. And then you've gotta get caught in a few small lies to make it look like you're terrible at it because it's all playing on other people's expectations."

"Reiner Braun, man of many talents," Bert said. "Lying, football, and maintaining a B average."

Reiner took a fake swing at him, and Bert laughed. It felt so surreal, sitting on Reiner Braun's bed as if they'd never been enemies in the first place.

"I like you," Reiner said, letting his arm rest across Bert's waist. "You're good. I'm keeping you."

Bert was invited to stay for dinner, and received a long interview during which he was asked three times if he had a girlfriend. He told Reiner's parents "no", but he did have intentions toward a girl, and he was planning to ask her out soon. They seemed happy enough with the answer. Reiner's leg ended up flush with his at some point during the meal, something Bert tried very hard to ignore because Reiner was warm, and being close to another human being like that was relaxing despite the fact that he was currently in the viper pit.

Reiner drove him back to his car after that, and hugged him before driving away again.

Bad things were coming, Bert told himself as he slid into the driver's seat. This wasn't going to end well.


	6. And The Truth

Reiner pulled him aside a full month, and four won football games, after they had re-met one another, and looked at him very seriously. "We gotta talk," he said in a hushed tone. Bert's blood immediately went icy.

Over the last month they had become good friends, but that was all dependent upon the fact that Reiner was repressing his own memories to cope with stress, which was not at all something that was assured to continue.

"Sure," he said, and allowed himself to be dragged out to the dumpster behind the locker rooms despite knowing it was dangerous. It was the football team's make out spot, and one of the few places in the school that wasn't under constant surveillance.

"So I've been keeping pretty quiet about it, but there's a lot of shit that has not been adding up," Reiner began. Bert listened nervously. "Like you. I don't know anything about you other than that we've had classes together before, but everyone acts like we've got history. I've got guys on my team asking if we're friends now like it would be weird for that to be a thing, and Annie won't tell me anything about it, and my mother is treating me like I decided I was Adolf Hitler, and committed genocide. There's no reason for any of this shit. I don't fucking get it."

Reiner took a deep breath, and turned around to look at the fence, leaning up against the wall. The dumpster smelled like plastic, and the rubber skin they put on punching bags. Bert assumed that was natural considering it was the one outside the P.E. area.

"So I guess I'm asking if you'll tell me, because I need someone to throw me a bone here, things aren't fucking adding up."

Bert took a deep breath, and hoped Annie wouldn't kill him for breaking the news.

"You're gay," he started, probably too bluntly. Reiner looked like he was about ready to punch him. "You're gay, and you came out to your parents, and they sent you to a conversion camp for almost a whole year, and it seems like it was so horrible that you didn't wanna remember so you forgot about it, and everything surrounding it."

"This isn't a soap opera," Reiner told him.

"I know," Bert said without looking at the other boy.

"You're fucking with me," Reiner said.

"No."

"Yes."

"I'm not."

"Fuck you!"

Bert looked at him then. He was distraught. Visibly, and noticeably distraught, his hands fisted at his sides, his shoulders drawn up a bit, his teeth digging into the skin of his lip. This was the bad that he'd seen coming.

Reiner took a deep breath, looked up, like he so often did, and pushed his hands into his eyes, continuing to breathe deeply.

"No," he said to nothing in particular. "No. I'm not. I'm going home. I'm done."

Bert wanted to do something, wanted to help, but didn't know how. He reached out, and touched Reiner's arm, but the other boy jolted away like he'd been burned. His eyes were wide and wild when they came out from behind his hands. The confusion spoke volumes. Annie had been right. He shouldn't have said anything.

They didn't speak again for a week. Annie asked questions about it, but he refused to answer.

Reiner avoided him like the plague. Annie reported that he really was getting serious about Krista. Bert tried not to think about it. It all made him feel guilty, because he felt like he'd finally grown enough to see someone through their faults, and understand what drove them, but still fucked it up badly enough to not be worthy of forgiveness himself.

No one else reported strange behavior. Krista was an isolated girl, not disliked by anyone, but not well known either. People respected her, seeing as she was the daughter of a high ranking ex official of the church, something Bert had never paid much attention to. Even with everyone vying for her attention though, she had always retained a level of being removed from school, and friends, ignoring those around her as if it were so effortless it was an accident, unless she was able to honor them with some favorable act.

Reiner spent his time with her instead of with Annie. He joked softly with Ymir, but always seemed wary. Bert watched from afar like a hawk trying to see the whites of a rabbit's eyes from the sky.

Two weeks passed, Annie increasing in irritation, the football team increasing in wins. The words "going to state" were on everyone's lips. The basketball team was beyond peeved, realizing that football would likely drag into their season if that were the case.

And then Reiner was calling him, asking him to ride out to some GPS coordinates. Bert weaved back, and forth between going for a good fifteen minutes before he got into his car, and drove out despite risks.

Reiner's truck was waiting there, seemingly without Reiner until he noticed feet hanging off the tail gait wrapped up in red sneakers. He pulled to a stop, and got out of the car, watching the other boy lounge.

He leaned up against the side of the truck bed, and looked down at him. Reiner stared back with his oddly colored eyes, looking like a sideways greek statue.

"I'm really mad at you," Reiner said without preamble.

Bert bit the inside of his lip, and held his breath in his chest.

"But not for why you think," he added. "I'm mad because you fucking lied to me."

"Technically-" Bert said to try and defend himself. Reiner sat up, and glared at him, suddenly much closer to his face.

"Ever fucking heard of lying by omission?" he asked. Bert chewed on the air with his mouth open for a few seconds before his teeth clicked back together. Point made. The score board clicked one for Reiner, zero for Bert.

"Annie said it would be too much of a shock," he admitted quietly.

Reiner shook his head. "Maybe you could have stopped, and thought for a second about how I was struggling to put the pieces of a puzzle I'd never seen together with a blind fold on?"

Bert took a moment to appreciate the imagery of that. Reiner sighed hard, and looked away.

"I'm really trying," he said. "It's in, and out. Like sometimes I can handle all of it, and it's there, but other times I can't, and I just shut it out. Like I disassociate with it."

Bert put his chin down on his forearms where they were folded on the lip of the truck bed, and watched the other boy. There was a myriad of emotions inlaid into the delicate flesh behind the stone of his armor. Bert breathed it in with silent fascination, reveling in the first real break he'd ever seen in Reiner's defenses.

The other boy's lips pulled up away from his teeth then, and he snarled at the air.

"I just fucking can't," he said. "It's all still in there, and I don't want to know, but if I forget, I just end up scared, and confused, and I don't wanna loose who I am because of this stupid shit, but I'm not fucking ready to deal with any of it."

Bert swung his leg up into the bed, and sat down next to the quarterback, leaning up against his arm as he cracked, and broke, and cried.

He didn't look at Reiner through it all, knowing it would breech the subtle, and unspoken code that men like him lived by. Reiner pushed the heels of his palms into his eyes, and sobbed until it was too much, and he screamed at nothing, frantic, and unable to cope with the shit in his head.

Bert slid his arm around the other boy's shoulders, and pulled him close, holding him there until the tears calmed, and he stopped sobbing.

"I'm sorry," he said when Reiner was still. "This is all my fault, I'm sorry."

Reiner was quiet. He didn't raise any qualms, but he shook his head softly against Bert's chest. He said nothing, like he'd breathed all his words out in breaths of pain and fire in order to cleanse the sanctity of the thoughts he had left.

Bert just sat there and held him.

 

\----

 

Bert told Annie about it without telling her anything specific, because he knew on some level that what he'd seen there was not for public consumption. Reiner lived beneath too many rumors already.

Together they watched him go through lapsing moments of lucidity. He rolled like waves on a shore through understanding, and denying, and came to them every time it got too hard.

The second time, Reiner had rolled himself a joint in order to numb some of it out. The fourth he'd turned to alcohol. The whole time, Bert just sat next to him, and let him talk through it. Let him talk through the big things like feeling sick now every time he was aroused, and the little things like the slurs passed around at home, and in hallways.

"I'm sorry," Bert told him maybe a thousand times, and every single one, Reiner simply shook his head, and fell quiet.

There was a hard week, and then things started to get easier. Reiner was lucid more often, and broken less often. He spoke easier, and dropped his mask like a weight every time he was away from prying eyes.

There were still hard moments, but they were fewer, farther stretched beneath them.

Bert started to feel like he was seeing who Reiner really was. Stilted, and scared, and too gentle for his own good. Beneath his armor, the titan was weak, and soft, and delicate. He was hard to physical attacks, but the things that found his cracks, and climbed inside him to rattled around inside him scrambled his insides like a whisk introduced to an egg.

He stopped suddenly after categorizing Reiner as the moments of softness between planes of brutal masculinity, and wondered in a moment of acute awareness if they were watching him the way he watched them. Were Reiner, and Annie learning him like a map too? Were they committing his every tick to memory as well? How had they classified, and categorized, and dissected him? What boxes had he found homes in, in their minds?

Reiner laughed when Bert talked about serious things, and made them feel light, and airy, and easy to overtake. How would he look at someone like Bert? Someone scared, and withdrawn, and meek. How would Reiner see that?

He found Reiner over at his house more and more, lounging on his bed, talking about school, and grades, and Armin's study group being over run by Jean trying and failing to hit on Mikasa. They talked about themselves, and each other, and Reiner told him in accidental words over the course of the next month that he saw him as solid, and safe, and brave, which Bert didn't understand in the slightest because he knew he was only a coward and a manipulator.

That was how Reiner saw himself too, it turned out. Bert didn't approve of it, but to be fair, Reiner didn't approve of Bert's own self image either.

Things were slow for a while. Things were slow, and somewhat easy, and October set in with the promise of Halloween, and candy, and parties. Reiner invited Bert the one the football team was planning to crash.

"I've got a costume idea if you don't," he said.

"Oh yeah, and what's that?" Bert asked him.

"Well you have to say you'll come first," Reiner said with a smile.

Bert made a show of relenting, but the truth was, he really didn't mind that much so long as he knew Reiner was gonna make sure nothing happened. It only occurred to him later that Reiner may have been asking him for a date. He thought about that long and hard, and decided that if he had been, there was nothing to fight. Trying couldn't hurt after all.

He did decide to ask about it later to be sure though. Football practice had just let out, and Bert tried to catch Reiner through the field of bodies crowding into the locker room, but ended up following them in. Reiner was in the back, shirt already off, working on unclipping his pads when Bert caught up.

"No homo," he heard someone say in the midst of their conversation, and watched Reiner's ears prick up like a dog that had heard a cat.

He turned, and pointed Nack right in the face. "What fucking species are you?" he asked harshly. The row of lockers went silent. Nack stared at Reiner's finger. "I asked you what fucking species you are."

"Human?" Nack guessed.

"No. What species are you?"

"Homo Sapiens?" Nack guessed.

"Now do you see exactly why saying "no homo" is stupid?" Reiner asked.

Nack shook his head.

"Because you are a Homo Sapiens. I seriously fucking hope you're homo, or we've got a fucking ape on our team."

There was another moment of tense silence in which Reiner turned back around, and pulled his pads off over his head. It fell right between the moment someone said "Dude he just schooled your ass" and Reiner noticed Bert was standing there, smirking at him.

"Can we talk?" Bert asked, watching Reiner go through several stages of embarrassment while managing not to actually blush.

"Will you let me shower, and change first?" Reiner asked.

"Sure, no problem," Bert said. "I'll catch you when you're done."

"Isn't that the gay kid?" he heard someone ask in a not quite hushed enough voice as he walked out. Maybe some things were never properly laid to rest. The football team was a big thing. Not everyone would have let it go, or seen past rumors, and phobias sitting with him at lunch.

Reiner was evolving though. He was overcoming some of it at least. Of course it made sense for him to start calling others out in his own house. Bert took up a seat on the lowest row of bleachers, and rethought asking. It just seemed like such a weird question, and was it really likely for Reiner to be ready to even start thinking about dating? Would he even think to? And if he did, why on earth would he ask Bert? Even further, why would he ask Bert to a football team event? All his conservative, bigoted friends would be there.

Reiner found him petrified by doubts, and unable to actually look up, fingers pressed against his lips.

"You're nervous," he observed right off the bat.

"Nah," Bert said past his lips.

Reiner sat down beside him, and they watched his team mates file out of the locker room, and into the parking lot.

"Come on, talk to me," Riener goaded when the trickle of other students had petered out.

Bert shook his head, and got a gentle elbow prodding his ribs.

"You're gonna tell me," Reiner said. "Maybe later, but either way it'll come out at some point."

Bert shrugged, and they watched Eren run out of the locker room much later than any of his peers. He looked at them like a deer in the headlights of a semi before trotting off.

"He always does that," Reiner said. "I don't know what the fuck's going on with that kid."

"You kind of took him under your wing, right?" Bert asked.

Reiner made a pained noise. "I don't know if my wing's the safest thing to be under right now, so no. I intended to, but now I just don't think I can handle the responsibility."

"That's really mature," Bert said.

"I hit puberty early."

He laughed softly, and then Reiner's fingers were niggling at his ribs.

"Talk to me, Bertl."

"No."

"Talk," he demanded drawing out the 'a' so it swooped downward at the end.

"Are you attracted to me?" Bert asked, head swinging around so he could look Reiner in the eyes. He regretted it instantly as he watched Reiner's face quickly switch between several shades of red.

Nervous sweat started on Bert's back.

"Why?" Reiner asked without breaking eye contact. He looked like he was about to have a conniption.

"I don't know," Bert said, turning back to the locker room door. "I just. I guess I want to know."

"It's not really important, is it?"

"It could be really important," Bert said, watching the football coach lock the locker room door, and turn to look at them for a moment.

"How so?" Reiner asked. "I don't see the relevance."

"Just tell me so I know if you wanna date me, and I can think about whether or not I wanna date you," Bert said sharply. Reiner went incredibly quiet, and the football coach smirked before walking away.

Slowly, Bert turned to the other boy. Reiner looked like he was three thousand miles away.

"You're thinking about it?"

"I don't know," Bert told him. "Should I be?"

"I used to beat the shit out of you for being something that I didn't even know you were," Reiner said, as though he were arguing against it. Bert wasn't sure who he was trying to convince.

"And things changed," Bert said. "It's been a year, and then some since that was happening."

Reiner's face pulled several micro expressions, hesitant in deciding what to display.

"Are you attracted to me?" Bert asked again.

Reiner groaned, and hid his face in his hands, elbows braced on his knees.

"Yeah," the other boy said softly.

"Good," Bert said, and wondered for a while if he should ask Reiner out . He didn't have the guts though, even with that settled, he didn't have the capability to take the necessary steps to try dating another guy. What if Reiner really wasn't ready? "You're not so bad yourself," he said instead of anything else.

"Are you gay?" Reiner asked. It wasn't the first time he had asked, so he had to know the answer, but Bert answered him anyway.

He shrugged. "I have no idea."

Reiner grunted, and stared out over the field. "You think there's people who like both?" he asked.

Bert shrugged again. "Bisexuals," he said. "But a lot of people say they don't really exist."

"What, like unicorns?" Reiner asked.

Bert laughed then, and the tension that had been in the last few moments eased a bit.

"I'd like to kiss you at some point," Reiner said, as if that was as far as his mind had even had the capacity to go. His arm dangled over the ground, just shy of brushing in the dirt as he leaned forward. "I think it'd be nice."

"Maybe when we're not sitting at school," Bert told him.

The smile that slipped onto Reiner's face then was soft, and genuine.


	7. Not Crying On Sundays

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay a new chapter

They didn't kiss. They did go to that party though, dressed as Titans. Reiner had managed to get a jacket for Bert somehow, and would not disclose his secret. So they went in letterman jackets with their faces painted as though they had no skin. Annie's costume followed the theme, though she was dressed in her cheer uniform.

A few of Reiner's team members, the ones who didn't pay attention, were confused by Bert's presence as a member of Reiner's entourage, but when their questions were met with silent stares the whole thing was accepted.

Bert had never been to a real party before. He'd been to birthday parties as a kid, and he'd been to the parties his parents went to: work parties. This was much different though. This was like every stupid movie he'd ever watched as a kid promised high school would be.

People were getting drunk, and high, and smoking cigarettes. Reiner looked around to make sure none of his players had any of the cigarettes in their hands, and that was as close to supervision as they got.

Bert didn't know the host, but he got the feeling their parents wouldn't be home for a while. Or at least, that was what he hoped, considering what the mess was going to be like in the morning.

Reiner supplied him with beer, and introduced him to friends from other schools, football players they'd fought against. Bert winced at the introduction, "This is my boy, Bertl," but found the rest of it amiable enough. It turned out that jocks were less likely to want to punch you if Reiner Braun sang your praises as your introduction.

Bert was patted on the back, and asked his position a few times, something to which Reiner always responded by laughing. "No, man, he doesn't play football, he's a swimmer."

"Do they have positions in swimming?" a mummy asked asked.

Bert shook his head. "They've got different strokes, but you just kind of swim in a line next to each other." He failed to mention that he didn't swim competitively, and found himself hanging out with the cool kids again.

Annie found her way to apple bobbing, pushing Mina's head down when the other girl actually managed to grab an apple. Someone had carved them to look like shrunken heads which Reiner seemed to find endlessly amusing. He was getting kind of drunk, and a feeling of nervousness set into Bert's stomach.

How were they planning to get home if Reiner couldn't drive? They'd all met up at Reiner's house, and now he was drunk, a soft pink tinge setting into his cheeks, and his movements becoming slightly less coordinated.

Bert confiscated his drink, and decided that they had definitely had enough. He didn't think to monitor Annie. In retrospect he probably should have, but he didn't think to.

Reiner's hand found his arm, and squeezed around the muscles. "You're always so responsible, Bert," he said softly. "Thanks." The nerves in Bert's stomach quelled a bit when he realized he wasn't being too much of a buzz kill.

It was a good thing, too, because Bert didn't want to take away from the fun Reiner was having. Reiner leaned forward on the couch to explain something to a trojan warrior sitting on the table near them, hand resting on Bert's knee for balance.

Bert tried not to think about it. Mina was sitting on Annie's lap next to him, dressed as a witch, and leaning up against his other arm, rating the attractiveness of the boys in the room.

"Look at you," she said after going through most of the room from her far left to where Bert was sitting on her immediate right. "Annie, look at him," she said, leaning back against Annie. Annie smiled as she looked over the other girl's shoulder. "He doesn't have any skin."

"I know," Annie said.

"But he's still kind of hot," Mina put in.

Annie threw her head back, and laughed as Mina poked at Bert's face paint.

"Can I kiss you?" Mina asked.

"Only if you kiss both of us," Reiner said, alert as ever to everything going on around him despite his level of intoxication.

"Deal," Mina said with a smile, pulling her skirt out of the way so it was easier to slip into Bert's lap. Bert found his hand caught between her thigh, and Reiner's side, and worried for a moment that kissing would ruin the make up on his face before he remembered that Annie had successfully bobbed for apples without ruining hers. A good thing because he had started to sweat nervously.

Mina tasted like alcohol, something he barely processed around the sound of about ten of the guys around him whooping. Reiner's hand slid around his trapped on as he gripped Mina's waist. She was soft, and small, but with a little imagination, if Bert really tried, she wasn't so delicate. Her hands were tougher on his chest, and her legs were heavier on his.

With a little imagination she was Reiner, and then Reiner was gone, and Mina was leaning over to kiss the boy he'd been pretending she was. Bert caught his breath hard as more cheering started, and watched Reiner kiss her, eyes closed, a hand cupping the back of her head, firm, but gentle like he knew how to touch someone smaller than him.

He saw their tongues touch, and watched Mina pull a little gasp as Reiner leaned back with a smirk. There was another little whoop from a couple of the boys as Mina slid backwards off of Bert's lap, and into Annie's.

She leaned against the arm of the couch with her feet still on Bert's thighs. Reiner's hand was still wrapped around his fingers, warm, and just a bit harsh as Bert stared at Mina's little black boots, thinking about the fact that he'd just fantasized about another boy while kissing a girl.

He didn't know if he was gay. He'd thought about it on occasion, gone over it in his mind, but he'd never come to a conclusion. He didn't know if he was gay, but he was definitely attracted to Reiner Braun.

A year ago he would have punched himself in the face for even thinking about it, but now it was nice, and Reiner's hand was nice around his. He squeezed the digits lacing into his palm, and they squeezed back as Reiner talked to the same pirate he'd been talking to for the past ten minutes as if they'd never been interrupted.

Mikasa appeared from nowhere, standing over Annie like she meant business, out of costume. Her red scarf dripped down off her neck like a warning for the kind of pain she was capable of inflicting. Bert tried to shrink into Reiner's side, looking at the expression on her face.

Annie looked up like she couldn't care less, blinking slowly.

"Where's Eren?" Mikasa asked.

"I haven't seen him," Annie said. "Why? Is he here?"

Mikasa snarled without making a sound, lips curling up over her teeth. "Where's Eren?" she asked again.

Annie patted Mina's side, and the girl stood up so she could move out from underneath her.

Mikasa was still sneering when Annie lead her down the hall. Bert watched them go with some confusion before Reiner leaned over, and whispered, "hate sex," in his ear. Bert blinked blankly at the kids popping a keg on the other side of the room before looking a Reiner.

"No!" he said incredulously.

"Yep," Reiner told him.

"You would know."

"I would know," Reiner agreed, letting go of his hand, and stretching his arms out in front of him. "We should go see if Eren's here," he said then.

Mina looked disappointed when Reiner helped Bert off the couch. They placated her with a couple of shrugs, and found their way up the stairs, and into the back yard. It was quieter not in the basement, and it turned out that there wasn't really anywhere out there.

They caught sight of Jean and Marco talking to Armin, who's very presence there broke several laws of the universe.

"Hey, little buddy," Reiner said by way of announcing them. Armin whipped around to look. "Do you know where Eren is?"

"Um," Armin said, dry-on-fangs flashing. "I think he ditched out on this one. He said he had somewhere else to be."

"Who are you here with, then?" Reiner asked.

Armin pointed at Jean and Marco. "Why are you asking?"

"Well, because Mikasa is attempting to hate fuck his location out of Annie right now, and honestly I don't want to have to deal with too much aftercare."

"How fucking much have you had to drink?" Jean asked as Bert put a hand on Reiner's shoulder to get him to shut up.

"He's had a lot," Bert told them, fingers digging in around the muscles that attached at Reiner's clavicle.

"Yeah," Reiner said. "Guess I'm not the one that'll be driving tonight, huh?"

"I hope not," Jean threw in. Reiner laughed, sort of throwing his hand in the other boy's direction before turning back to the house.

"Let's go, Bertl," he half slurred. "We have a bottle of Jaeger Meister to find, and a really bad pun to make." It was a bit of a relief to know that Reiner planned out his horrible puns because if he hadn't it would have had to be a God given gift, and Bert just wasn't ready to accept something of that magnitude. Of course, Reiner's drunken idea of where to look for a bottle of Jaeger Meister lead them as far away from where one would even possibly be as they be. Bert stood in the doorway of the master bedroom, watching him check the bedside tables, and desk drawers as he insisted he knew what he was doing.

"You're not going to help me look?" he asked after a moment of silence.

"Reiner you're not going to find any Jaeger Meister here," Bert said.

Reiner smiled at him. It was a sloppy, genuine smile. "You got me," he said. "I'm over it like my mother's over that one time my dad punched her."

"Kind of a dark analogy, don't you think?" Bert asked. Reiner shrugged, pulling something out of the bedside table, and looking at it closely.

"Hey look, Bertl, it's some kid's mom's vibrator," he said, turning it on. Bert watched him burst out into a gale of giggles.

"Jesus, are you getting more drunk?"

Reiner shrugged half heartedly before turning the vibrator off, and sliding it back into the drawer. "I just think it's funny that it looks like a tube of lipstick is all," he said before curling a bit, and falling sideways onto the bed. "Come here," he demanded, holding out a hand.

Bert listened, crossing the room. Reiner caught him, and pulled him down onto the bed so that they were lying on their sides, looking at one another.

"Are you coming onto me?" Bert asked.

"Nah," Reiner said. "Not here. I just wanna cuddle."

He really did, too. He tucked his head under Bert's chin, and pressed up against his chest with a small, throaty noise.

" 'Cause I like being close to you," he added. "And I'm kind of sleepy," followed after another pause.

Bert felt the other boy playing with the hem of the jacket he was wearing.

"My mom sewed it," he said after a bit. "You managed to convince her I'm not thinking about holding your hand or anything, so she likes you 'cause she thinks your cute."

"That's good to know," Bert said.

"It think you're cute too," Reiner added.

Bert smiled at the door to the master bathroom. "Go to sleep Reiner."

Reiner did fall asleep, breathing evening out slowly into a long pattern. Bert waited until he was sure the other boy wouldn't wake up before he went to look for Annie.

He found her in the guest bedroom in the basement, smoking a cigarette, and watching Mikasa put her shirt back on. Neither one of them seemed too perturbed by Bert's presence as he closed the door behind him for discretion's sake.

"We tracked down Armin, and he said Eren isn't here," he told her.

"Where's your boyfriend?" Mikasa asked.

Bert tried to claim Reiner wasn't his boyfriend but was cut off by Annie saying "They're not dating."

"Oh," Mikasa said softly. "Marco said-"

"Marco's more of a gossip than a catty tweenaged girl," Annie said sharply. "He shouldn't be talking about things he doesn't understand."

Bert blinked between the two girls as Mikasa buttoned up her pants. There were bruises on Annie's shoulders, and wrists where the paint ended. Bert didn't really want to know what kind of violence the blanket was covering.

"Did Armin say where Eren was?" Mikasa asked, wrapping her scarf back up on her neck.

"He said he didn't know," Bert told her.

She grunted, and breezed past him out the door like nothing mattered.

Bert looked at Annie, and wondered if he should ask if she was alright before following Mikasa out.

He drove them home that night, wary of how to handle Reiner's truck as it was much larger than the Saturn his mother had handed down to him. Annie sat by the window, staring at the road while Reiner slept on Bert's shoulder. No one said anything about anything until they were home, and Bert was waking Reiner up.

It was about three in the morning if the clock on Reiner's dashboard was correct. The other boy blinked blearily as Annie slid out the door. "Wuzz?" he asked.

"You're home," Bert said. The sentence was punctuated by the sound of Annie wrenching into a bush.

Ah, Bert thought, the glamorous life of a popular high school student.

 

\----

 

"I suppose it wasn't too bad," he found himself saying.

"You used condoms, right?"

"Mom!"

"I'm just asking."

"Mom, I didn't have sex!"

His mother nodded, chewing a cookie slowly, and watching him sharply. "Uhuh," she said.

"I didn't."

"Then why do you look guilty right now?" she asked. He shook his head, and braced it on his hand.

"I made out a little," he admitted.

"See?" she shouted in response. "I knew it! You have a girlfriend?"

"No."

"Boyfriend?"

"No!"

"Then you're just kissing random people?"

"Oh leave him alone, honey," he dad said, opening up the refrigerator. "Kid's gotta start getting into the swing of college some time, right?"

"I just want him to be safe," she said.

Bert groaned.

"See? He's got a hangover."

"I don't have a hangover, mom, I didn't even get that drunk."

"Yes, but you were drinking!" his mother exclaimed as if she'd managed to wring the information out of him through particularly clever means. He groaned again, and she took a deep breath. "I don't mean to embarrass you, I just want to make sure you're alright. These things can be dangerous, you know?"

"I know," he said softly.

"Do you have plans today?" she asked then.

"Maybe you should have that boy come over," his father said. "The blonde one. What's his name?"

"Reiner," Bert said, thinking about the way it had felt to hold hands last night.

"Yeah, him."

Bert smiled a bit ruefully at the table top. It was Sunday. Reiner would be in church with his family. He wondered what it must be like to sit through that given everything that had happened. Was he afraid when he sat in church, and listened to the things that were preached?

He didn't invite Reiner over, but he did text him.

They texted about being hungover in church. Reiner griped about God. "Before camp I was nearly an atheist," he said. "But now that I'm back, I feel like he's looking over my shoulder disapproving, and it is the creepiest fucking thing. Man, fuck God. I don't want that."

It was funny, but terrifying at the same time. Bert thought about the crucifixes on the walls in Reiner's house, the one hanging behind the head of the dinner table, right above where his father sat looking imperious, and disdainful.

Then instead of inviting Reiner over, Bert invited Reiner out.

They met outside burger king, and got sodas before climbing into Reiner's truck, and driving out to the middle of nowhere to sit in the truck bed.

"Sorry about passing out on you last night," Reiner said at one point.

"Nah," Bert replied. "It wasn't as bad as having to drive your truck home. I was convinced I would kill us all."

"You didn't though," Reiner said.

Bert laughed softly. "Is it scary going to church?" Bert asked.

"No more scary than it is to be with my folks," Reiner told him.

"Is that scary?"

"Yeah," Reiner said softly. "It's not just them though. It's everyone. I'm afraid they're gonna look at me, and see through me, and know that there's something wrong." Bert frowned.

"There's nothing wrong with you," he said. Reiner shook his head, and Bert took note of the fact that Reiner had never said the word gay. He'd said fag, and he'd said faggot and fairy. He'd used the insults, but Bert had never once heard him say gay, and none of those slurs had ever been used to describe Reiner. All of those words were words that Bert had heard come out of the other boy's mouth in violence. Reiner had never said Reiner was gay.

Was he afraid to say it, and make it concrete?

"That's funny, because my whole life I've been told that if everyone has the same thing to say it's not them, it's you," Reiner told him.

"But it is them," Bert argued.

Reiner's fingers clenched up on each other. "How do you do it?" he asked. "How do you just make everything seem like it's so normal, and okay, when it's not? I want that. I want to do that, I'm so fucking jealous because if I could do that it wouldn't be so hard, you know?"

Bert leaned into Reiner's shoulder, and Reiner leaned back. It was warm where their bodies touched even though fall was making the cold creep in. Bert turned his head, and pressed a kiss to Reiner's temple. The other boy laughed, and pushed playfully at his shoulders.

"I like you," he said quietly.

"I like you too," Bert returned, because he did, and he loved the smile it brought to Reiner's face. They ended up holding hands again, fingers intertwined. It was still nice. Bert squeezed around the digits lacing into his palm and they squeezed back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So if anyone actually read chapter eight during the short time it was up, or noticed that it was in fact up, you're not having a trip. 
> 
> I was simply informed that it lacked clarity, and took it down for further revisions. For more information on it, and/or possible spoilers should you be like me and actually enjoy spoilers, you can click on over to my tumblr though my bio, and find related posts tagged "fic" by typing a little "/tagged/fic" after my url.


	8. The Tapes We Play

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't read end notes until after the chapter. You may have some questions, I'll answer them there. Please don't read ahead if you don't want spoilers.

Reiner asked him out on November first. He asked him if he wanted to go somewhere far away where no one would see them, and they could be alone, and Bertholdt said yes because Reiner was standing on his front porch, shuffling his feet, and refusing to look him in the eyes. It was cute. It was cute and he was pretty much perfect clutching at the elbow of his jacket like that would give him the courage to get the rest of his stuttered proposition out into the air.

Reiner was so confident most of the time but this reduced him to a stuttering mess.

"I'd love to," Bert said, and watched the tension in the other boys shoulders bleed out. Reiner smiled and carded a hand back through his hair.

"Well, I'll pick you up tomorrow at eight?" he asked.

"Sounds good," Bert said, watching the other boy grin, turn on his heel, and tromp down the stairs. He smiled after him, and shuffled his feet before closing the door. The glass paneling was cool when he leaned up against the door, and listened to the engine of Reiner's truck start.

"Not your boyfriend, huh?" his mother asked from around the corner. Bert jumped nearly clean out of his pants with a short, startled shriek.

"He's not!" he exclaimed when he saw her cocked eyebrow, and the hands on her hips.

"Maybe he wasn't," she replied.

"Oh my god mom, we are just going to a movie," Bert cried, turning away from her to march up the stairs.

"Why is it so bad to have a boyfriend?" she asked, making him pause as he went to take the first step upward. He felt his shoulders follow his stomach in plummeting towards the floor.

How was he supposed to explain it? How was he supposed to explain the bullying, or his retaliation, or Reiner's time in camp, or the fact that everything was so toxic that he felt it start to creep up inside him, and make his chest another nest for its disgusting existence. He groaned, and turned toward her with a look of what was probably terror on his face.

He wanted to tell her it was bad because of all the threats in the hallways. He wanted to tell her it was bad because of all the children who's parents threw them on the street for it. He wanted to tell her it was bad because of all the nooses hanging in closets around the world.

He didn't though.

Instead, he swallowed, and forced a fake smile. "It isn't," he said.

The look on her face multiplied in severity as she started over the floor. "Then what's all this about?" she asked. "What's all this inability to tell me about him?"

"He's not ready," Bert said, and that was that. It was all he could say without telling her she'd inadvertently failed to keep him safe. She would feel so guilty if she knew. She would be so angry, and there would be nothing to be angry about.

"And why isn't he ready?" she prodded.

"Because he's just not," Bert told her. His foot was still rooted on the first step, and he leaned into it suddenly taking another step.

"Bertholdt!"

And another step.

"I am not done talking to you!"

He reached the top of the stairs, and turned back to her. "Well I'm done," he said weakly before he was in his room, closing the door tight behind him. He leaned up against the wood, and listened to her sigh loudly, and tromp off.

Reiner would be driving home, listening to music, maybe singing along. He wasn't thinking about it, Bert shouldn't be either. He took a deep breath, and called Annie.  
   
\----  
   
Annie was twenty seven different flavors of fucked up, but she was still a good friend. She and Reiner were both good friends. She told him to drive out to the lot where he seemed to be spending most of his time these days. She met him there with beer, and a tape that she held up for him to look at with a waggle of her eyebrows.

Bert was amazed. He didn't even realize people still used tapes. Even CDs seemed a little out of fashion.

"Does that say porn?" he asked.

"Take a seat," she told him, sliding back in behind the wheel, and scooting her seat back so she could prop her feet up on the spokes.

He did as he was told, and she handed him a beer, punching the tape into the cassette player.

"Lean your seat back, gay lord."

Bert shrugged, and played around with the levers on the side of his seat as the tape started playing. Reiner was talking.

'I got seventy eight of these mother fucking things,' he said. Someone laughed in the background. 'I just figured we could get some use out of them.'

'So audio instead of video?' the person asked. It was Annie.

Bert could practically hear the shrug before the next sentence. 'That way they can't say anything about children or what not.'

'Well that doesn't work if you mention it on the tape,' Annie chastised.

Bert looked at her nervously, but she held a finger to her lips. "It's gonna get good, I promise," she said just as Reiner laughed.

'Get the fuck over here,' he demanded. There was a great shushing sound of fabric on fabric, and Annie giggled as he supposedly dragged her toward him. Bert imagined them on a bed, or maybe the couch in Reiner's basement.

'Don't manhandle me, you know I always win,' Annie said. She clearly took a breath to say something else, but broke out in the gale of giggles instead. Bert tried to imagine what Reiner had done. Maybe he'd tickled her or something. 'Stop! Stop that.'

There was silence. Annie was looking at him from the driver's seat. He heard the sound of kissing soft in the background of the car as he stared back at her. The tape played her voice moaning, and Reiner chuckling deep in his throat.

More fabric hissed hushing sounds, and Reiner swore quietly.

'Yeah,' Annie said. She moaned again, moaned long and low. Bert had heard that moan before. He knew what her face looked like when she felt good. What he didn't know though, and what tormented him was that he had no idea what Reiner looked like.

He didn't know what it was like to watch Reiner come undone. He had no idea what those hands would feel like, what that skin would feel like. He wanted to know. He desperately wanted to know.

Reiner groaned for the first time, and Bert felt it like an electric charge running through the center of him from the crown of his head down to his tail bone. It was a deep sound, one no one else could have made.

'Tight,' Reiner said, and his voice was tight to.

Bert looked away from Annie because he couldn't bare to see her anymore. He felt nervous, and embarrassed, and worst of all aroused. Sweat was pooling in the small of his back, and beading on his forehead, and he pulled his sweater tighter around himself to try and contain it all.

'Fuck you're tight.'

Reiner moaned again, the sound stretching out, and ending on a high note. Annie laughed softly. 'I can get tighter,' she said.

Bert looked at her, casually sipping her beer, with wide eyes as she made Reiner whine in the recording.

"I thought Reiner was gay," Bert said, trying to ignore what that sound did to him.

"He's as fabulous as two fairies having a glitter fight in assless chaps," Annie replied. "He's also neck deep, and treading Nile waters so," she trailed off just at the tape played her voice demanding a faster pace.

Bert listened greedily, sucking up every little sound, the sound of heavy breathing, and the scooting of wood across the floor, the agonizing creak of springs. He soaked in Annie's breathless laughter, and the seeming ease of the two of them when Reiner returned it, and told her to turn over.

Annie's hand was sudden on his knee, gripping the grooves of bone in the joint, moving upward with subtle rubbing motions towards his crotch. Bert leaned his head back over the head rest as her palm squeezed him through his jeans. He swore in time with Reiner's voice.

He came desperately, arching off the seat as Annie muffled a scream in something on the tape. Her duality at that moment threw him out of reality, surrounded him with both of them as he gnawed at his lip, and clawed at the armrest inset into the car door.

He panted as they panted, as Annie panted twice, as they all regained their breaths. The tape cut out then, playing static silence into the car.

"Feel better?" Annie asked.

He breathed out hard, and reveled in the feeling of air rushing out of his lungs. "Yeah," he said.

"It's best to be distracted sometimes," she told him.

He chuckled, listening to the sound of shuffling fabric again as he adjusted in his seat, and suddenly snapping back into the fantasy of what the two of them had looked like together.

"What you need is some time to just be a normal," she told him. "And not have to worry about anyone snooping into what makes your dick hard."

He laughed again, and she slammed the heel of her foot into the horn in the center of the steering wheel.

"Let's go be crazy kids, huh?"

"Yeah," he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, due to the fact that this chapter was a bit controversial the first time it was posted I would like to clear a few things right up. A) Annie's playing a sex tape. It's a cassette tape, so it's all audio. Bertholdt is sitting in the car with her listening to it. B) Reiner, and Annie have had sex. This does not denote any sexual, or romantic attraction nearly so much as it denotes how fucked up their upbringing has been. Reiner is in the closet, Annie is sexualizing herself for validation. They still view each other as close friends or even family, and if you read the other installment in this series, you are probably aware that sexual interaction between the two of them has been mentioned before. I just want to say that there are a lot of reasons people have sex, and most of them are not the right ones. This is not meant to be indicative of healthy behavior at all. These are very damaged people.
> 
> The misunderstanding has been cleared up, and I'd like to apologize for probably blowing things out of proportion. I am someone who is wont to overreact. I want things to be enjoyable for everyone, and so sometimes I make things that aren't much of a problem into a big deal. I love all of you guys. Every bit of feedback means a ton to me, that's why I take it so seriously if you have a complaint. Because writing fanfiction, and posting it is the best way for me to improve, I try to take every bit of criticism as constructively as possible. Of course being as emotional as I am, while I may be taking things constructively, and working to fix any problems that doesn't mean I'm not being a big baby about life. This is not intended to make anyone feel bad so much as it is my own issue. Once again, your feedback, all of it- good and bad, means mountains to me as someone who is working to grow in their trade. Thank you very much.


	9. A Friend Named Berik

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been waiting for this chapter for SOOOOOOO LOOOONG

Reiner took him out. They got into his truck, and Bert kicked his feet up on the dashboard as they pretended like it was no different than just hanging after school. Reiner drove them to Lynchburg, and they chatted about why on earth someone would name a place Lynchburg as they neared the city limits.

They stopped off at Glow-A-Rama, and played arcade games to kill time until the movie started. Bert beat Reiner at air hockey what must have been a dozen rounds, and they laughed like idiots, surrounded by middle schoolers and freshmen.

When they beat it out of there, it was with some kid's mom yelling at them because Reiner had bad language. They saw Man of Steel, which would have been alright if Reiner hadn't been enough of a Superman fan to be incredibly insulted by the whole thing.

Bert got to hold his hand, and listen to him mutter good naturedly under his breath about blatant product placement, and a complete lack of understanding for the characters' motivations, and goals. Bert found it endearing and though it completely ruined the movie for him, he was glad that the experience had the personal flare. It wasn't that great a film anyway, he could tell, and so he probably ended up enjoying it more with Reiner's commentary whispered harshly into his ear.

They left the theater at ten o'clock, and grabbed burgers, and coke even though they'd probably eaten enough popcorn in the theater. Reiner pulled them over in an empty parking lot, and they pulled their feet up onto the seat bench so they could sit facing one another as they ate.

They joked about school, gossiped about members of the football team. Eren seemed to be the hot topic in the locker room. Everyone knew he was sleeping with someone, maybe even dating someone, but no one could find out who. Jean theorized it was Mikasa, but Reiner seriously doubted it. Early last year, Reiner had taken Eren under his wing. They'd spent a lot of time together. Reiner'd gotten to know him pretty well before he had been sent away.

Apparently, Eren saw Mikasa as a sister, which was good for legalities and all that what with her being adopted, and he'd lost his virginity to Annie. When Bert asked how Reiner knew that, Reiner'd shrugged and said "I was there," as if that were the most normal thing in the world.

"So you had sex with Eren?"

"God no! Bert, Eren's like a kid, I'd never have sex with Eren. Annie had sex with Eren. I sat next to them, and watched TV."

"What the fuck, Reiner?" Bert asked.

"I had to make sure no one was suspicious anything was going wrong, and they would have thought it was weird if I wasn't down there, and they came to check."

"But they wouldn't have thought it was weird if two teenagers were just fucking on the couch?"

"Annie's skirt was covering all the action, and my parents wouldn't suspect anything nefarious unless the evidence was literally being shoved down their throats. They're kind of stupid. They don't even know what weed smells like."

Bert was a bit amazed by that claim. His own mother had smelled weed on a shirt he'd been wearing around Reiner three days after the fact. She was almost as bad as Mr. Zacharius.

"So you just sat there, and they had sex next to you?" Bert asked.

"Yeah nbd," Reiner said with a shrug. Bert thought about the sex tape, and how he knew Reiner, and Annie had done it. He pulled his teeth over his bottom lip, and took a deep breath, looking away from the other boy. Reiner nudged him with his foot. "You okay?" he asked.

Bert nodded, and set his burger on the dashboard. Reiner watched him almost warily as he finished chewing his food. The didn't break eye contact. It left an odd tension in the truck's cab before Reiner looked away to study his steering wheel.

That was the only reason Reiner wasn't looking at him when he leaned forward, and stole a kiss. He watched Reiner fluster like one would watch a bird fluff it's feathers. The other boy looked absolutely scandalized, and then Bert had kissed him again, and the pure offense in Reiner bottomed out into a playful glare.

Bert smiled when he kissed back, surging forward every bit the football player he was. It was good that Bert was taller than him or Reiner might have bowled him over, or squished him. He laughed against the other boy's mouth just enough for Reiner to be able to catch lips between lips, and deepen the kiss. It tingled where their skin met. Some new kind of frission was born in the spaces between where they touched, rolling along the entirety of him, and swallowing him up in a single moment of shiver.

At the halloween party, Bert had watched Reiner kiss Mina, and wondered how it would feel, if that was really the other boy he could taste on her lips. It was so much better now that it was real. He tried to put Reiner's past sexual exploits out of his head right then. They didn't need to be dwelt on after all. Kid's did things. It was how they learned.

That was what Sister Hange said anyway.

He slid a hand into Reiner's hair, and pulled the other boy closer, trying to match him in movement, probably clumsily. Eventually the kiss devolved into them pressing their cheeks together, and laughing. Bert breathed deeply, and marveled in the fact that Reiner did not in fact smell just like his football gear. He gave that thought a small snicker, because of course Reiner didn't smell like his football gear. Most people didn't constantly smell like they'd been working out so far as he could tell.

Reiner shrugged so that they settled in closer to one another, sharing body heat. It was more the both of them leaning up against one another than it was a hug, but Bert wasn't complaining. It felt nice. He found himself surprisingly unconcerned with what was going on between his own legs, and that left it easy to handle. That left it easy to enjoy without mounting pressure, or the fear of stepping too close to unknown boundaries.

Reiner's fingers hooked into his belt loops, and hung there happily, holding him close in only the gentlest way. It was nice. Bert didn't feel smothered. There was a way out if he needed to cut off contact. He would be fine, and completely able to disengage if necessary.

"I like you," Reiner said against his collar bone.

"I like you too," Bert returned over the other boy's shoulder, more to the window than anything else. And then Reiner tensed like he'd been electrocuted. The hold on Bert's belt loops was suddenly gone, dragging the heat of Reiner's body along with it as the other boy retreated back over the seat, eyes locked on something behind Bertholdt the whole time.

Slowly, and with great apprehension, Bert turned around.

Annie's father was standing outside the truck glaring at them. Bert heard Reiner swallow, and then the driver's side door was cracking open.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Bert asked harshly under his breath.

"I'm handling this," Reiner told him, even more quietly.

Bert watched him walk around the front of the truck until he was standing face to face with Annie's father.

"Mr. Leonhart," Reiner said. There was tension in his hands, creeping up into his forearms. They both stood the same, the perfect testament for the supposed to be. Annie's father only came up to Reiner's chin, but he was undoubtedly a threat. Standing in a dark parking lot in the middle of the night, they looked like the last, lingering members of the Aryan brotherhood after a meet up. It suddenly occurred to Bert that he was not only possibly queer, he was definitely brown. He looked down at his hands, and tried to ignore the sinking feeling or dread, and doubt in his stomach. It wasn't often that his racial status made him feel as out of place as his qestionable sexuality did, but there he was.

"Reiner," Annie's father said. "What are you doing all the way in Lynchburg?"

"Hanging out," Reiner told him. "Playing some air hockey, seeing that new Superman movie, getting some dinner. Usual stuff."

His voice was so steady as he lied through his fucking teeth.

"What was all that then?"

"All what, sir?"

"All that hugging. If you're not more careful son, people'll think you're a faggot."

Bert flinched hard, and looked out the driver's side door. He wondered if maybe he should bolt, but that would only make it look worse.

"I'll be sure to keep that in mind, sir," Reiner said.

Bert heard Mr. Leonhart say something more quietly then, and Reiner offer him a goodbye before walking back around the car, and sliding back into his seat.

He closed the door, and sat for a moment, staring at the steering wheel. They waited in the dark until Mr. Leonhart's car roared to life, and puttered away, leaving them in complete silence.

"He's going to tell my parents," Reiner said gravely, softly, like he was watching his entire reality unravel in front of him.

"I'm sure he wont-" Bert started.

Reiner turned the key in the ignition, cutting him off, and shoved his seatbelt into the buckle unceremoniously before waiting impatiently for Bert to do the same.

They followed Mr. Leonhart back home, Burgers forgotten as petty novelties of some other time and sodas left to flatten in cup holders. Reiner didn't say a single thing. He didn't even look at Bert. His eyes stayed firm on the road as he navigated them back.

He dropped Bert off at the curb outside his house, made an offhand joke about kissing him on the porch that was followed by a short laugh, and then lapsed back into his uncanny silence.

Bert wondered if people were as unnerved by him being quiet as he was by Reiner being quiet. He held out a hand wanting to lay it on Reiner's shoulder or something but then thought better of it, forced a laugh at the joke, and slid out of the car.

"Meet again sometime?" Bert asked.

"Sure whatever," Reiner said. "I'll see you at school."

"Yeah, I'll see ya," Bert said. He closed the door then, and watched Reiner drive off. It left an awful taste in his mouth, and no matter how many times he told himself it wasn't his fault, he still felt guilty.

He trekked inside slowly, and pulled himself up the stairs one leg at a time, leaning up against his bedroom door when he'd closed it. He sank slowly to the floor, and curled around himself then. He was alone now, he could crumble.

He didn't want to do anything. He couldn't think of a single thing that could be said or done that would help. He took a deep breath, and tried to push away that crushing feeling pressing in around him. Maybe if he could hold it off, he thought, he wouldn't have a panic attack. The last thing he needed to have was a panic attack.

\----

Reiner didn't talk to him the next day. Bert lingered in a limbo where he wasn't even shot a text message. He called Annie, and told her about the incident. She showed up about fifteen minutes later, and took him out to get ice cream.

They were sitting outside, talking over their cones when Reiner held the door open. Bert perked up instantly at seeing the other boy. He'd opened his mouth to say something when Krista stepped out of the ice cream shop. Something inside Bert's chest plummeted towards his feet, and he looked quickly back to Annie, not even wanting to know the context of the situation. Annie was staring at Reiner, eyes hard, and Bert tried to catch her attention back so that he wouldn't take it as an invitation to come over, but he'd had already noticed.

His eyes brightened up when they landed on Annie, and Bert groaned, trying to hide his face behind his hand.

"Hey guys," Reiner said, slinging an arm around Bert's shoulders. It made Bert feel sick, thinking about last night and how the other boy was here with a girl after everything. He got it. It made sense. He understood why, but he'd thought things were going so well for a second. "You here on a date?" Reiner asked with a waggle of his eyebrows.

"No," Annie said. "Bert's too much of a bitch for me to date him."

Reiner laughed and Bert shot her a look, but she was glaring at the blonde boy. It wasn't an obvious glare so much as it was the subtle kind of icy gaze given by proper Catholic mothers when their children acted up in church.

"Oh, don't say that," Reiner crooned. "You're a stud, aren't you Bert?"

Bert groaned again, and shook his head, pushing the other boy away. He hid his face in his hands, and tried to will himself to stop sweating, but he remembered the night before. What it felt like to kiss Reiner stood in stark contract to the way he had been when he'd first come back, and Bert knew what was happening.

"Alright, fine," Reiner said, still in good humor. "I won't ruin the mood for you lovebirds anymore than I already have. See you at school," he added, falling back into step with Krista. She said something that Bert couldn't and didn't want to hear.

"Ymir isn't with them," Annie said softly, and Bert froze, because Ymir was always with Krista. The only reason Krista ever went anywhere with Reiner was because Ymir was with them in order to calm her parents' delicate sensibilities.

Bert swallowed hard, and stared at his ice cream cone. It was suddenly very unappetizing. Annie looked at him, expression unreadable in a way he hoped his was. More than likely his own face was pale and sweaty, belying how very shaken those few moment had left him.

"Do you think-" he started to ask, but Annie cut him off.

"Stop," she said. "Don't worry about it now. We're gonna take care of this the same way we did last time, it's all going to work out."

Bert swallowed, and let that be the last thing they said. He watched Annie finish the last of her ice cream, but didn't bother finishing his own. It wound up dumped in a trashcan, and forgotten. Bert almost wanted to feel sorry for it, but he was too busy feeling sorry for himself.

"I kind of expected this," Annie said when they were sitting in the car again.

"You did?"

She nodded. "Yeah. When you told me about it this morning, I kind of expected this."

Bert bit his lip to try, and get the bitter taste out of his mouth, but it was useless. Reiner was going back to not being Reiner, or at least that was what it looked like. Then there was the curiosity that was Krista without Ymir, alone in the company of a member of the male sex.

Annie came inside with him when they got to his house. She balanced on the edge of his bed and remained a silent entity in the room, playing with her phone the whole time. He paced for a bit and then sat down to read which proved to be futile. So he tried to watch television, and then he tried to play video games. He was still stuck level grinding in Pokemon, and decided it wasn't worth the hassle right then.

He ended up laying sideways on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Annie's leg was warm pressed against his arm, the only reminder that he had someone to get through this with him. He thought about Reiner. There was so much there deep down. Like Annie, he'd taken something interesting, and wrapped it in something mundane, and expected no one to ever notice. Beside the two of them, Bert felt like the opposite. He felt like the mundane trying to blend with the interesting crowd.

"What was Berik like?" he asked after a long time had passed, and Annie had put her phone back in her purse.

"He was a lot like Reiner," she said. Their sides were flush, his shoulder to her thigh as she leaned up against the wall. He could feel how uncomfortable talking about Berik made her through that connection, but neither of them said anything about it. "He was really tall from what I remember. He might have been your height, maybe taller if he was still alive. Reiner loved him. They did everything together. It was like our families were married. Our dads were all fishing buddies, our moms were all baking friends. We got together every holiday, and Berik and Reiner would always make me do annoying things like play football with them in the back yard. I remember sometimes we'd pretend to play house just to make my mom feel better about me only having boy friends. The two of them were inseparable though."

She paused, and Bert felt horrible for ever asking. A small chuckle bubbled up out of her throat, something humorless, and dry. "Sometimes they used to hold hands when they thought no one was looking. I think that was Reiner's idea, I mean Berik called the shots but Reiner was in love with him, you know? I always knew anyway. I never knew if Berik loved him back though and it always kind of bothered me. I remember right before Berik died he'd started dating this girl, I mean, we were in sixth grade so it wasn't such a big thing but he was dating this girl and it pissed Reiner off so bad. Whenever Berik was with her, Reiner would sit with me and just glare at them. I got it too because it was hard not to be in love with Berik. He was just really nice and always knew what to say."

"So he was better with people than Reiner?" Bert asked.

She chuckled again. "Berik's the person who taught Reiner how to be with people. I remember him giving us people classes so he wouldn't be embarrassed being seen with us in public."

There was a long paused that Bert let drag itself out. Annie took a deep breath and he knew the next thing she had to say would be bad on an instinctual level. "After he died, Reiner just kind of quit. I didn't know what to do because he'd always been a hundred percent before, and then it was just like he was only the shell of it left. No one else seemed to notice but I didn't think it was really my place to tell him how to feel better so I just kinda stayed with him, I guess. I slept in the guest bedroom at his house for like three weeks straight and I barely ever let him out of my sight. I already had one dead best friend, you know? Not that Reiner, and I had really been that close before, but I'd thought they'd always be there, I guess." Bert was amazed by the evenness of her voice as she said all this. Not even the faintest hint of emotion got through. "It never really helped. I mean, he stopped looking like he was gonna die any minute but he never went back to being the way I remember him. It made me feel stupid because I was trying to fix him. I guess that was when I realized you can't fix a person."

"What are you trying to do now then?" Bert asked, because it seemed an awful lot like they were still trying to fix Reiner.

Annie shrugged. "I don't know," she said, and there was the emotion threatening to spill through. "I guess I'm just trying to help."

She didn't look at him, but he knew what her face would look like. He knew her eyebrows would be furrowed, and her mouth would be a thin line. She would look angry, but the truth was she was just trying to grapple with her own emotions. Slowly, he reached for her hand, and threaded their fingers together.

"Did you and Eren really have sex?" he asked, changing the subject.

Annie's body shook once with a bark of laughter that broke quietly in the air. "Yeah," she said.

"Wow."

"You about to tell me that he's too young?" she asked.

"No. I wasn't even really thinking about that. It's just that Reiner told me about it and I couldn't believe you'd have sex with someone else in the room."

"Well, I didn't want the Yeager bomb getting too rough with me," she said. Reiner's presence as insurance suddenly made sense.

"How many people have you slept with?" he asked. There were four he knew about. Reiner, himself, Mikasa, and now Eren. It seemed like an ever growing list.

"I told you I was a slut," she said.

"I don't think you're a slut."

She jolted, and there was another long pause. He watched the curve of her ear because she turned her face away.

"You're the weirdest guy I've ever met, you know that?"

"Probably," he said, turning to look at the television's blank screen. Her hand tightened around his.

"I really hope Reiner gets his head out of his ass soon," she said then. "I don't want you to have to deal with his shit all the time. Eventually you'll probably give up, and then I'll never get to see him get married to someone he actually likes."

"I'm not the end all be all of him having a relationship," Bert told her.

"I really doubt he'd take the risk for anyone else."

It was his turn to avert his face then. He felt slightly warm thinking about it that way. It was pleasant. It was nice to think he was needed, but he knew deep down that that wasn't the case.

"Do you think," he started after some time had passed and their palms were beginning to feel sweaty pressed together like they were. "That maybe the reason he was so hard on me wasn't because he was trying to run from being gay so much as it was him trying to run from betraying Berik?"

He felt her shrug. "Maybe," she said. "I don't think I'll ever understand what's going on in his head."

Bert looked out the window and let silence fall over them because he wasn't creative enough to think of another thing to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can you feel it mister crabs?


	10. Of Bathrooms Past And Present

Bert didn't talk to Reiner outright for a few days. Things continued as they had been. Reiner kept his distance, and dated Krista. Ymir was nowhere to be seen most of the time. She skulked about cheer practice, and in the hallways, but was rarely ever seen near the love birds. 

It was almost like Krista, and Reiner were behaving the same way. Bert understood instantly why they would have chosen each other out of anyone else at school. It was because they were both the same. Their relationship was a safe zone for getting used to the opposite sex. 

He kept his head down, and spent more time with Armin and Marco to try and put some distance between himself and Reiner. Of course spending time with Marco meant knowing everything that was possible to know about almost everyone.

Three days after the ice cream incident, Marco sat down across from Bert, and Armin in the library with bright eyes, and a smile on his face.

"You'll never guess what I just learned," he said. Armin instantly perked up, and looked away from his book. Bert wondered how on earth Jean managed to deal with spending almost all his time with two gossip mongers. Jean suddenly seemed like a very dangerous man.

"What?" Armin asked, fingers playing with the corner of a page.

"Ymir, and Krista are on a break."

"I could have told you that," Bert said.

Marco waved him off. "No I mean like, Krista's parents know that they're dating, and have forbidden Krista from seeing her, so Krista's trying really hard to be with Reiner."

"They're dating?" Bert asked.

"You should pay more attention," Marco said. Armin laughed softly. 

Marco, and Armin were a very interesting part of the social pyramid that had nothing at all to do with the rest of it. Marco had always seen himself as above all that nonsense, and Armin had been bullied until freshman year when Eren had hit it off with Reiner and he'd been given extended protection. Now he joined Marco in watching from the sidelines like the whole school was some soap opera he didn't have to participate in.

"Krista, and Ymir are this high school's current epic romance," Armin said. "Everybody's routing for them." By everyone he meant him, and Marco. 

"Epic how?"

"Well you know the overcoming huge obstacles like the erasure of lesbians, and the bigotry all around them," Marco explained. "Then of course there's Reiner," he said, changing the subject. "I'm pretty sure he's gay, but I can't get a bead on him, you know?"

Bert fell very silent. 

"I mean why else would he have had it so out for you during my first two years?"

"He's had it out for me since we were freshman," Bert explained. "And to be honest, I don't know why. It's over now, so I don't really care."

"Yeah, it's over, and the two of you are suddenly best friends?" Marco pressed.

"If you haven't noticed, the two of us aren't really speaking right now. The only reason we're friends is Annie."

Marco gave him a quick smile that was nothing more than a twitch at the corner of his lips, and turned to Armin. He thought he knew something, but Bert was going to let it drop because asking if he did would just be falling into his trap and giving the boy more information. Of course the information wouldn't get any farther than Jean because nothing that passed between the four of them ever really got out but Bert still wasn't keen on them having anything definite about him at all.

He was a conundrum even to himself. No other person should be allowed to unravel what the fuck was going on before he did.

"So Krista, and Reiner are gonna try, and make it as a pair," Armin said. "This is going to fail spectacularly." 

Marco nodded with a rueful expression. "I just wish I'd be able to get more details on how when it does," he said. 

Bert watched the two of them talk through his peripherals as he tried to pretend he was reading about economics. 

"So you never thought about maybe dating Reiner?" Armin asked after some time had passed, and he and Marco had discussed every other angle on the Krista/Ymir/Reiner triangle.

"You never thought about dating Jean?" Bert replied. Marco, and Jean were the two people most likely to be secretly having gay sex according to Annie. On the other hand though, Armin and Jean had exchanged some sultry looks on occasion, and when it came down to it, if Reiner Braun was gay anyone could be.

The table went silent, and both the other boys looked away from him as if to pretend no one would ever have said that. Bert stopped pretending to read, and watched their faces incredulously. "Jesus," he said then, pushing his chair back from the table, and covering his face with his hands. "Don't tell me you two are catty fighting over Jean fucking Kirschtein."

Marco cleared his throat. "No," he said, but the awkward air didn't dissipate. 

"Then what is this?" Bert asked, leaning back over the table, and pointing at both of them at the same time. 

"It's nothing," Armin said very pointedly.

"You kissed him," Bert accused the blonde. Armin stiffened. Marco bit the corner of his lips. "You kissed him of something, but Marco's sleeping with him," he said then. Marco looked at the ceiling, and Armin stared pointedly at the floor.

"It's not really important," Marco said, holding his chin up with his hand, and trying to play it off.

"You guys are such fucking hypocrites," Bert said. "You act like you're above all the high school drama, and yet here you are. Fuck."

"That's not how it is," Armin insisted.

"You know what?" Bert said. "I don't give a shit how it is. It's not important to me, it legitimately isn't. And you know what else? It's not important to you what's going on in my life that I don't wanna talk about, because if I'm not talking about it then it's probably for a pretty good reason."

They both stared at him. "You were a lot more meek when we started having study group like this," Marco said. "Reiner's good for you."

That made Bert feel sick. He went back to reading, or trying to. He honestly couldn't care less about trickle down or gross profit, or anything right then though. Marco watched him for a bit before continuing on the conversation with Armin as if nothing had happened.

Reiner was good for him. Reiner had been a punch in the face and a jeering name in the hallway for so long, and then he'd been an abstract concept on Annie Leonhart's lips for a full year. Now he was an inconstant, and fickle force, and Bert was his snapping point. Good wasn't the word he would have chosen.

"I'm gonna go," he said, standing up. Marco, and Armin both watched him cautiously as he left the library. He left his book at the table, and didn't think twice about it.

When he swung the door open, Reiner Braun standing there with a glare on his face. He snapped Bert up by his uniform tie, and started hauling him away.

"We need to talk," he said, always going a mile a minute and never thinking to stop for anyone else's sake.

Bert's heart was beating in his throat. Oh god, this was going wrong. What had he done this time? Was Reiner really that far back now that they were back around to punching, and screaming? Was everything worth nothing?

He didn't fight it though. He let Reiner drag him into the boy's bathroom, and then he watched the other boy go to each stall, and check that no one was in there. He found Daz sitting in one of them, drawing a dick on the wall.

"Daz," Reiner said. 

"Reiner."

Reiner and Daz had an interesting and public relationship that almost everyone at the school knew about. Daz had tried to bully a freshman Krista their sophomore year, and Reiner had never really forgiven him it, though he'd also never kicked the other boy off the team, allowing him to remain a wide reciver. 

Once, at the beginning of Junior year, the two of them had gotten into an altercation over Armin Arlert where in Reiner had demonstrated the ability to pick the other boy up like a five pound sack of flour, and shake him one handed. Daz had avoided Reiner like the plague ever since.

"You wanna leave real quick?" Reiner asked.

Bert saw Daz nod, and stand up. He capped the sharpie in his hand, and said a quick "excuse me" as he slid past Reiner. His eyes locked on Bert instantly, and he looked back at his captain. Bert saw the smile, and he saw it dawn on Reiner just what exactly what was going on in Daz's head.

The quarterback's arm came out like a harpoon, hooking around Daz's neck, and pulling him back flush with Reiner's chest.

"You havin' ideas, Daz?"

"No, sir," Daz said very quickly. 

"You know I can kick you off the team any time, right? I can personally ruin your future by making sure you never get that football scholarship."

Daz nodded, and Bert was once again reminded of the completely different worlds he and Reiner lived in. For him football was a game other people played. For the football team, it was their ticket to the rest of their lives. 

Reiner let Daz go and the boy scrambled out of the bathroom as quickly as possible. The door was closed, and locked when he was gone, and Bert felt a sudden dread at being alone with Reiner in the bathroom where everything had started.

"We've gotta talk," Reiner said again, ringing his hands, and pacing in front of the urinals. Bert watched him warily. "Things aren't going real well for me, and I'd go to Annie, but I feel more comfortable talking to you about this because she just wouldn't get it, you know?"

"Not really," Bert said.

"Fuck."

There was a long silence, Riener watched the tile on the floor reflect the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.

"I can't sleep with Krista," he said finally.

Bert blinked, tried to wrap is head around that, and shook his head. "Why would you want to sleep with Krista?"

"Oh I don't know, maybe because she's my girlfriend?" Reiner said. Bert watched the cuffs of his jacket ride up around his wrists, and realized the other boy had grown at some point.

He walked over to the him and traced the small bundles of thread that spelled his name across the left side of his chest. Reiner watched him with interest, head cocked slightly to one side.

"Just because you're dating someone doesn't mean you're attracted to them," he said softly.

Reiner made a face, the corners of his lips pulling down to match the furrow between his eyebrows. "But I am attracted to her," he claimed.

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure, she's perf-"

Bert kissed him.

He felt Reiner stutter to a complete stand still, heard his brain stop working, and shut down completely, and pulled away to watch what he'd just done. He had a habit of Breaking Reiner Braun after all, and each time there had been a different effect.

Reiner stared at Bert's mouth for a moment, amber eyes wide. Bert waited. He waited, and watched as Reiner booted back up, and his stomach became a breeding ground for fear, and doubt.

Reiner's gaze flicked from his mouth to his eyes, and the other boy took a shuttering breath. "That felt nice," he said.

"Yeah," Bert replied.

Reiner's eyes went wide, and he took a step back. "Oh no no no. God no. No fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. SHIT!" 

The bathroom fell back into silence. Reiner looked at him, eyes still wide, and shook his head.

"No," he said again. "Please."

Bert stood dumbfounded, and watched it all go. Reiner waffled between chanting obscenities, and pleading with him as if he had the power to change something that was already set in stone. The tears began to well up slowly at first, but before Bert knew it they were streaming down Reiner's face rapid pace, and the other boy was trying desperately to wipe them away. 

He wrapped his hands around Reiner's wrists gently, and pulled them away from his face, then he kissed him again, and Reiner kissed back.

It wasn't like it had been in the car five days ago. It was more like it had been the first time, last year just, before Reiner had been sent away. It was desperate, and grappling, and it kind of hurt when Reiner pushed Bert into the wall next to the sink.

He let the other boy dictate it, allowed Reiner to pull on his tie, and the collar of his shirt so he could press more kisses down his throat. He let Reiner's hands seize him at the waist, and pull his hips forward so that they rocked together. 

It sent a flurry of sparks up into Bert's stomach, and chest, and Reiner swore again into the fabric of Bert's uniform blazer. 

Their shoes squealed on the tile when Reiner pushed up into him harder, an arm wrapping around Bert's neck so that he was nuzzled against Bert's ear. Reiner groaned, low, and deep. It sounded like it had on the tape but purer, without the crackle of the recording. Bert pressed back, and was greeted with another sound, similar, but higher pitched. He wanted to make Reiner whine. 

Bert let his hands find holds on the other boy, let himself push, and pull to keep it all going. His knees felt weak, and his head was spinning, but he had no intention of stopping, and Reiner didn't seem to either. 

They stayed quiet so that the sound wouldn't carry but with Reiner's mouth against his ear, Bert heard it all from the tiny gasps to the swear words. Reiner smelled like he had in the car, and Bert reveled in it as the other boy's free hand groped for purchase along the tile wall, and he rocked onto his tiptoes.

Reiner gasped, and whined, hand tightening on the back of Bert's jacket. Then he whined again. Bert swelled with pride. That was what he'd wanted. He was responsible for that sound in the same way Annie had been responsible for it, he pulled the other boy closer, and bit hard onto the skin of his throat.

Reiner surged, his fingernails scraped against the wall, and then he hit it hard with his fist, leaving a resounding thud to hang in the room, and mingle with the choked sound of his orgasm.

Bert held him through it, felt him twitch, and shudder as it washed over him, and then allowed him to relax into the hold as it passed. He didn't cum, but he also wasn't thinking about it right then. It didn't seem important. Instead he focused on the other boy, breathing, and living beside him.

"Shit," Reiner said after a moment. Bert could tell he was about to say something else, but there was a sudden pounding on the door. 

"Who the hell is in there?"

Reiner pulled back, eyes wide. It sounded like the coach. Reiner was shaking his head.

"We're not gonna talk about this are we?" he asked in a hushed tone as quickly as it was possible to speak English, and still makes sense.

"Who would we talk about this too?" Bert replied. Reiner nodded, and looked down at his front to see if his jizz had leaked through his underwear, and onto his pants. He gave a quick thank you to Mary, and turned to the door. Bert ran to one of the stalls, and climbed up onto the toilet after locking the door.

The pounding on the door stopped.

"Braun," Bert heard Coach Levi say.

"Coach," Reiner returned.

"Are you smoking weed in the bathroom?"

"No sir."

"Reiner," Levi said, and there was a brief silence. "If you're smoking weed in the bathroom, and you don't want to get caught, you should at least pay the people who are already in the bathroom off before you send them out."

"Yes, sir."

"Now pay me off."

Bert's eyes widened as he heard Reiner chuckle.

"I wasn't smoking weed," Reiner said again.

Levi gave him a curt "oh". "So there's someone in one of the stalls, huh?"

Silence.

"There we go. Who is it?"

"No one, sir."

"Really?"

More silence. Bert wrung his hands around each other.

"Fine, I'll leave you to it, and I'm not telling anyone, but don't do it again, okay?"

"Yes, sir," Reiner said.

"Good, now get the fuck out of here, there are kids that need to use the bathroom."

"There are other bathrooms," Reiner protested.

"There are also teachers that have keys to get into these bathrooms. This isn't exactly the safest place to be getting your rocks off."

"That wasn't the intent."

"Yeah, but it was what you ended up with," Levi said. "I know you're a kid, and I know you're hormonal, and to be honest, Braun, I like you so I'm letting you off easy because I'm not much better at not thinking with my dick, but that doesn't mean that I'm going soft on you. You fucking owe me. You owe me big time."

"Yes, sir," Reiner said again.

"Now I suggest you stagger your exits. You come with me right now, and we walk to the locker room, where you get a change of clothes because I can smell the jizz in your pants. Then whoever else is in here waits until other people have come in, and leaves."

"Alright," Reiner said. Bert heard him follow Levi, and let his feet slip off the toilet back onto the floor.

He waited there for what seemed like an eternity, climbed out of the stall eventually, and rubbed his hands together under the tap for even longer until Eren, and Armin came through the door talking about video games.

Armin looked at Bert, but opted to lean up against the wall next to the urinal Eren used instead of saying anything. Bert hated feeling like it was entirely possible he knew everything that had just gone on through powers of deduction. Maybe he'd been waiting around in the hallway, watching Levi talk to Reiner.

Bert was being paranoid. He told himself that it was just paranoia, and left.

 

\----

 

He didn't see Reiner for the rest of the day, but when school let out, and he walked back to his car, he received a text.

"I'm not gay," stared up at him from the screen of his phone. 

He groaned, and typed back, "I know," because clearly what had happened hadn't been jarring enough to snap Reiner out of his delusion again.

"Good." there was a pause, and Bert slid into the drivers seat of his car before his phone buzzed again. "You wanna hang out?"

"Like a date?" he asked.

He stared at the phone through the pause that followed that question until Reiner wrote back. "Stop fucking with me, Bertl."

"Like a date, or not like a date?" Bert asked again.

He could almost feel Reiner's annoyance. "Where the fuck is your car parked?"

Bert gave him the street name, and Reiner pulled up about two minutes later, parking behind him.

"Not like a date," was the first thing he said upon getting out of the car. 

"Sure," Bert said.

Reiner took this to mean Bert didn't believe him, and leaned in through the open car door to give him a piece of his mind. "I mean it," he said very seriously. "Not like a date, just like us hanging out like we do."

"So we're just going to ignore that we've been on a date before?" Bert asked. He saw that throw a wrench in the cogs of Reiner's delusion, and he saw Reiner remember, and attempt to rectify the glitch in the program.

"That was a joke," he insisted.

"And it was also a joke when you came in your pants in the bathroom?" Bert asked.

"Why are you such a fucking asshole?"

"I don't know maybe because my boyfriend's delusional, and telling me that us going on dates is a joke?"

Reiner's face fell from anger to guilt in no time flat. Bert watched him think on that for a second, and then watched it dawn over his face.

"I'm your boyfriend?" he asked.

"Yeah," Bert said. "Yeah, I guess so, I mean if you wanna be."

"Okay," Reiner said. "Yeah that's-" he stopped, looked at Bert, scraped his teeth over his bottom lip, and looked away. "That's good," he said. "I can be that."

"Where do you wanna go?" Bert asked then.

"I don't know, I guess we can just go back to my house."

"Sounds alright," Bert said. 

"We can watch TV, or something."

"In the basement? On the couch that Eren Yeager lost his virginity on?"

"He's not the only person who lost his virginity on that couch," Reiner admitted.

"Really? Who else?"

"Well, me. Annie."

"You gonna wait until you're a big football star, and Annie's all over every MMA championship ever to sell the couch where you both popped your cherries for millions of dollars?" Bert asked.

Reiner laughed, still bent through the door, clutching the roof of Bert's car to keep himself from falling over. "Oh please like that'd happen."

"You're both good," Bert told him. "It might."

"Can I kiss you when we get there?" Reiner asked, words quiet, face open.

Bert smiled at him, and shrugged. "I don't know, maybe if you play your cards right," he said.

Reiner's face lit up. "You're fucking on," he said, before standing up quickly, and jogging back to his car. "Race you there!" he yelled.

"You're on!" Bert shouted back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And a chapter with a happy ending because my editor's been hounding me about making everything sad.


	11. Bertellin' what was Bertold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's lots of talking and crotches in this chapter.

Of course when it was all said, and done, Bertholdt looked back on his actions the day he and Reiner had officially dubbed themselves boyfriends and regretted almost everything. He convinced himself at least three times during the following two days that he had been being rude, and short, and that he needed to apologize for everything.

He had a habit, it seemed, of being polite only until a certain point, at which time he would snap and make a fool of himself. 

Reiner laughed at him whenever he said sorry though. He said it wasn't a problem. He couldn't remember Bert doing a single thing other than calling him out of his shit. "I need that," he said when they were sitting in Bert's bedroom, watching television. "No one ever calls me out anymore, you know?"

"Did they used to?" Bert asked. He'd already seen this episode of Scrubs, and so wasn't very interested.

Reiner shrugged, and frowned at the screen. "Someone did," he said kind of sadly, and Bert instantly knew he was talking about Berik. 

"Well I promise to call you out every once in a while," Bert said. He watched the smile on Reiner's face break slowly into his eyes. 

"Good. Even Annie lets me skate on most offenses."

Bert smiled too, thinking about the weight of both their hands lying intertwined between them. The bathroom remained a memory in the back of his mind that he kept tucked away for moments alone when he could properly dissect everything that had happened. Reiner had yet to talk about it. No one else knew.

Of course, after he'd finally convinced himself that Armin did not in fact know anything about what had happened in the bathroom he'd noticed Levi smirking at the two of them standing on the edge of the football field when Reiner was taking a water break. Reiner continually told him it had been a grimace but Bert was almost entirely convinced it hadn't been. 

Levi probably knew. 

How on earth Levi knew was a loss as far as Bert could grasp but he felt it deep down in his gut. 

Marco and Armin talked about Eren's sex life more. Armin confirmed that it was not Mikasa, that in fact, Eren had been spending more and more time away from home. 

"His mom keeps saying he spends nights at the coach's house in order to get away from home. Problems with his dad. And apparently that weirdness between him and Mikasa from last year still hasn't cleared up. I've never seen them fight this long," he told them at lunch. 

"I could have told you that myself," Jean said. "Eren's mom hangs out with my mom, and so I've kinda gotten to know her. She tells me rumors in the PTA sphere, I tell her rumors from the student sphere."

"So you're getting to know your enemy's mother?" Marco asked waggling his eyebrows. Reiner cuffed him lightly on the back of the head.

"No in team mother fucking," he said in all seriousness before breaking out into a grin. Bert flashed him a smile.

"I'm seriously starting to think he isn't sleeping with anybody," Armin said. "There are no leads. Dead ends after dead ends, and I've been working this case tirelessly."

"You make it sound like it's actually work," Connie griped. Bert agreed with him.

"It is actually work," Armin insisted. "I have to watch his every move, and Eren's as unpredictable as he is bad at reading."

"I have a problem reading too, they call it dyslexia," Reiner threw in.

"If you wanna stalk Eren, you should go to Mikasa," Sasha said. The bust of her uniform wrinkled as she leaned over the table, and Bert tried desperately to understand the mechanics of that before giving up a second later. "It's all she ever talks about at practice. Eren this, Eren that. It's kind of boring."

"That's not true," rare, and slightly detested input from Ymir, sitting across from her. "Mikasa also talks about doming the shit out of hot male celebrities if you get her drunk enough."

"And if you're fucking her she talks about whores, and stuff like that," Annie said. Reiner laughed, deep, and hearty, slamming his hand into the table top.

"Oh, honey tell me all about how you, and Mikasa do the do," he crooned. She gave him a reluctant smile, and threatened to fling her mashed potatoes at him. He responded by stealing them off her spork to eat them much to her faked chagrin.

Jean groaned. "If you're gonna get hard to Annie's imagined sexual exploits with Mikasa at the lunch table, I'm gonna leave."

"Oh, you've got a problem, Jean?" Reiner asked jokingly as he, and Annie both rounded of the boy. It was terrifying how in tune they could be. 

"That's my future wife you're talking about," Jean claimed.

"Yep," Reiner said. "I'm sorry I forgot. Ymir just invited over to her house for a blow job after school too."

"Oh honey, any time, you know I like penis!" she called from down the table. Marco snickered. 

"We always have such rousing lunch conversation," Bert said. Reiner laughed again, softer this time. "Is there ever going to be a day that I don't have dicks in my salad, because I think the football team has set out to make sure that never happens."

"It's all the homo eroticism," Marco said. "Just gets dick on the brain." Jean took a turn to snicker, and Bert shot them both a look. Marco was the closest thing to a stereotypical gay guy the school had. No one could say anything for sure, but there were rumors as to why he was on the football team, and why he was such good friends with Jean Kirschtein both of which would make him talking about homoeroticism particularly funny. Armin seemed to agree with Jean that Marco was currently hilarious.

"Where else does it get dicks?" Reiner asked.

"Anywhere I want them," Marco boasted happily. Reiner laughed again, and patted him on the shoulder across the table. It was all the proof Bert needed to know Reiner would never suspect Marco was possibly homosexual. Likely he'd never suspect that of anyone on his team. The team was family, and therefore beyond that sort of questioning after all.

"Hey, look, It's Krista," Jean said under his breath. He was pointing at Ymir who had suddenly gone pale as a sheet. Bert followed her line of sight, and saw Krista picking her way to their table. 

Seeing her was always a bit of a shock, because she was one of the few girls who wore her skirt full length rather than rolled up. When she and Ymir had been talking they had been quite the dichotomy standing side by side, Krista's skirt brushing her knees, Ymir's barely brushing the backs of her thighs.

Ymir looked down at her plate, and Bert watched Krista come around to Reiner's side. "Would you mind?" she asked softly, gesturing out the door of the cafeteria. 

Ymir picked up her tray, and walked away very quickly. Reiner cast a look at Bert before shrugging and saying, "Sure."

They left followed by a school of ravenous eyes. Marco pushed his bottom lip into his mouth with his finger tips as he watched them, chin balanced in his hand, filing all of it away for later use. Jean watched Marco. Sasha and Connie stared uselessly at the place Ymir had been. Bert and Annie kept their heads down and ate their food.

"Today's interesting," Armin said.

Bert thought about the bathroom, and how Reiner had said he couldn't sleep with Krista. That had implied that he'd tried hadn't it? Imagining it made him feel slightly gross. Of all the things that were never meant to happen. Of course it also made him worry about the two of them being alone together.

Annie told him to drop it when he mentioned it quietly to her as lunch was ending. He didn't manage. Instead, it stayed bundled up in his mind until school was over, and he was walking Reiner to practice.

"What'd you and Krista talk about," he asked when they were in a less crowded area.

"Home life mostly. Hers not mine. Things are pretty hot with her parents right now. They haven't been too happy with her it seems," Reiner told him.

"What are they like?" Bert asked.

Reiner turned to him, eyebrows raised. "Her parents?" he asked. Bert nodded, and he shook his head. "Never met 'em. I've just heard the horror stories about all the passive aggressive dinner conversation. Surprisingly enough, they seemed to like Ymir before."

"Weird," Bert said. "Is it too pushy to ask what's going on?"

"You gonna tell Marco or Armin?"

"i wasn't planning on it," Bert said. Reiner gave the air in front of them a grin.

"Well we tried to have sex, and it failed pretty spectacularly, and afterwards, she tells me."

"Tells you what?"

"That she's," Reiner trailed off. "Well y'know?"

"Gay?" Bert tried.

"Jesus, Bert, don't say that out loud," Reiner said. "You're gonna get somebody lynched."

Bert thought about Lynchburg and why someone would name a city that to begin with. "I don't think anyone would actually get lynched."

"You don't know that. You never know that," Reiner claimed.

They were rounding the back of the school building and no one was around when Reiner slowed down. "Anyway, she told me all about Ymir and how she's not nearly so bad as she seems, and I kinda knew that just from what I'd seen of the girl, but Krista really kind of fleshed it out for me. Anyway, her folks found out, and she doesn't want Ymir's foster parents finding out because Ymir's somehow got them convinced she's a good little girl and shattering that image would probably get her sent back into the system again."

"Another foster home?" Bert asked.

"Krista said because of her age it'd be unlikely for her to be able to get that lucky. Group home probably."

"Shit," Bert said.

"Yeah."

They stood in silence for a moment, Reiner scuffing the sole of his shoe on the beaten, and loosened asphalt. "Anyway, she'd been looking for me during lunch because she wanted some advice. Her mom threatened to camp her last night, and I texted her about the camps at one point, so she wanted my input."

"What did you tell her?" Bert asked.

Reiner rolled a shoulder, and met his eyes. "Run," he said, and there wasn't a bit of joking in anything right then. Bert sucked a cold breath of air that stung his lungs.

"You can't just tell people to run away from home," he said.

"You don't know what you're talking about," Reiner told him before heaving a sigh that sounded like it bore a hundred tiny horrors on its back and shrugging. "I need to get to practice," he said.

Bert walked him the rest of the way, and sat on the bleachers with a book as the two teams worked opposite one another. They hadn't lost a single football game that year, and it was starting to look like Reiner Braun was going to have his second perfect season as captain.

He sounded happy shouting rhymes with the other boys during drills. The school motto was chanted loudly and with great vigor as they did up downs, keeping a one-two beat. Eventually, the girls took over shouting for them.

"Sei sind!" they'd scream, and be answered by a deeper "Das Essen!". "Und Weir!" "Sind Die" The last word remained hanging in the air the way it would have before a game until it was over, and the football team was bent clutching their knees trying to catch their breath.

With a team name like Titans coming out of Virginia, a lot of people expected their field introduction to include some sort of reference to Remember the Titans. Reiner had told Bert on occasion about the first year they'd taken it past state, when they'd managed to eat into the summer season for a couple of games. Teams had mocked them before they ran out onto the field by singing "we are the titans" and then been blown off their asses when the Titans entered chanting in German.

"Don't get me wrong," Reiner had said. "I love that movie, but there is something special about it being the school motto. It's got so much more impact."

"Jaeger!" the team huffed in a wilted victory, exhausted, and sweaty. Levi stood in front of them, and shook his head proudly.

He called Reiner over after telling the team practice was out. Bert watched them speak, Reiner looked back at him for a moment, before turning back to the coach, but it was just long enough for Bert to really start wondering what they were talking about.

Eren was quick to Levi's side when Reiner was gone. Bert watched the coach suspiciously as he talked with the boy, nerves tightening his throat. If Levi knew, and told Reiner it could upset the delicate balance he'd established. Reiner was alright, Reiner was happy. No one needed to fuck that up now.

Eren seemed completely at ease with Levi for the moment or two that Bert watched them before they were in the locker room. He'd been all a flutter with grand gesticulations, and animated facial expressions. Their leaving was punctuated by a harsh shout of "Seventeen!" from Eren before the door closed.

"It's cute watching him with the footballers, huh?"

Bert jumped, and looked up to find Ymir leaning over him. 

"They treat him like he's their fucking dad, I swear. Got good grades and want to show them to somebody, show them to Levi. He won't show any actual emotion, but you'll know he's proud deep down somewhere in your messed up little heart."

Bert gave her a quizzical look as she made herself at home behind him. 

"So what's up with you crashing every practice? I mean I know you're friends with Annie, but it's kind of weird that you stay late to just watch her jump around in a tiny skirt," she observed.

"I'm not here to watch Annie," he told her.

"Oh so I'm right then? Are you here to watch Reiner? Does sex conquer all?"

Bert bit the inside of his lip, and looked away. He wanted to tell her to fuck off, or say something cool, but no courage or particularly interesting comebacks materialized out of nothing, so he just stared at Shadis picking up cones that had been left on the field.

"So the cute twink likes playing hard to get," she said, leaning further into his space. "What do you say? Do you hate me enough that I could be your daddy?"

"You're not really making sense right now," Bert told her, casting around for an out, any out at all. He and Ymir did not get along. She was naturally an inflammatory person, and the last thing that Bert ever wanted was any sort of conflict. He avoided her out of a simple, innate knowledge that they were too foreign to each other for there to be common ground.

"I'm sexually harassing you," she said slowly like he was stupid and wouldn't understand.

"Why would you do that?" he asked.

"Oh what because I'm a lesbian I can't sexually harrass a guy?"

"Why are you talking to me?" he asked. He realized it was rude when it was out of his mouth, and instantly regretted it. He must have looked ridiculous with his eyes bugging out, and his lips receding into a thin line.

Ymir laughed. Her cheer skirt fluttered out around her thighs when she dropped onto the bleacher beside him, legs splayed. He was caught for a second with a very prominent eye full of her underwear that was more than enough to tell him she shaved. He looked away, blinking at the air for several seconds as she continued to laugh at him.

"Can you close your legs?" he asked.

"Why?"

"Your skirt's too short."

"Oh, what, you're telling me you don't like the show?" she asked. She looked predatory, arms braced on her knees as she leaned into his space, legs still sprawled.

Bert leaned backwards away from her, and her smile dropped instantly

"Tell me what's going on with Reiner, and Krista. You've got the inside scoop what with having his dick balls deep in your mouth so tell me," she said. 

"I don't have anything to tell you," Bert said.

"Oh come on, Bertl-" he flinched at the nickname, and the sudden movement as her leg came out to press a foot pressed against his balls. "-you're a weak minded guy. You never stand up for yourself. You get walked all over by everyone. How many siblings do you have?"

"Four," he said.

"They don't go here. Why's that?"

"They're older."

"Well I guess that would make sense as to why little bitty Bertie is such a bitch, wouldn't it?" she asked, pressing down harder. He shrunk away, but she followed him, scooting forward on her hands, foot never loosing its place. "Boys or girls?"

"Girls."

"Aw. I thought it'd be boys. They say the more sons you've had the more likely the next one is to be queer," she told him, raising an eyebrow. He tried to shake his head, but she pressed down harder, the ball of her foot causing more than a bit of nerves now, and actually creeping mild discomfort. "Were your sisters mean to you, Bertl?" 

Only Reiner called him that.

"Did they take your things, and put you in dresses? Is that why you're such a fag?"

"Why are you doing this?" he asked.

"Tell me about Krista, and your boy toy," she said like it was simple.

"Why don't you ask Annie?"

"Because Annie actually has balls."

Bert was struck for a moment with a wave of incredulity, and he looked down at his own crotch, where her foot was pressed firmly against his balls and back at her. She raised an eyebrow at him, clearly having gotten the implication that her logic was flawed being as she was currently using his actual balls to hold him hostage.

"Just fucking tell me already," she insisted, voice taking on an edge, shoulders rising slightly. He watched her pupils contract somewhat, and her lips curl back. She looked ugly snarling like that. Ugly and terrifying. He'd seen a lot of people wear that expression, and it was never a good thing.

Shadis had gone into the locker room. Bert wondered desperately if maybe they'd be done showering soon. He really hoped Reiner would come out. Annie would probably be a better bet for scaring off Ymir though.

"I really don't have anything to tell you," he said.

"God fucking dammit! I don't have all fucking day, you piece of shit! You tell me right fucking now!" she hissed, leaning further forward. Her face twisted even more, pulling her freckles into swirling patterns on her cheeks.

"Ymir!" Levi bellowed from the locker room door. She jumped, her foot cutting jaggedly into Bertholdt's inseam. He bit his lip, and grimaced at the jolt of pain that shot like a knife up into his testicles. "Are you giving boys foot jobs in my house?"

"Why would I be-"

"Shower! Now! I don't wanna have to come up there, because law suits against the school or not, I will drag you by your cunt hairs all the way into the locker room and parade you in front of your teammates like a dog on a leash if you don't listen to me right now!"

Ymir's foot came away from Bertholdt's crotch like a breath of fresh air, and Bert took a a bit of time to be in absolute awe of the football coach in that moment despite the fact that his nuts still hadn't stopped reminding him that he'd been made uncomfortable at one point.

She stood up with a flourish of skirt that managed not to show anything else off, and tromped down the stairs. Levi watched her walk all the way into the girl's locker room, standing almost completely still save for the movement of his head as he tracked her over the small corner of field she had to cover in order to get there. When the door had closed behind her, he turned, and gave Bert a short look before spinning back into the locker room like he thought he was a top.

Nervously, Bert checked that the coast was clear, and took a moment to adjust his package in his pants in an attempt to comfort his terrified anatomy.

Reiner was out of the locker room no more than a minute later with his gym bag under one arm, and his backpack under the other. Surprisingly, it was Eren that was walking next to him. Bert squinted at them across the field, trying to understand why the younger boy hadn't decided to stay late after practice after so long doing so.

Reiner was talking, upper body moving in a way that screamed "if only my hands weren't full so I could elaborate", but he stopped when he saw Bert stand up, and start down the stairs.

"What is it with tall people? Do you all flock together?" Eren asked.

"You sound like Levi," Reiner said. Eren made a face, but didn't say anything about it.

"What were you two talking about?" Bert asked.

"Football. What did you do while we were in the locker room?"

"Got my unborn children's potential lives threatened by an angry cheerleader's sneaker. I think I'm gonna go home now," he added.

Reiner's eyebrows pulled down dramatically. "Wait, what? Tell me what happened?" he said, drawing closer to Bert. Eren looked between the two of them with wide eyes.

"Ymir, I guess," Bert said.

"You guess? She threatened you?"

"Who hasn't she threatened?"

"No," Reiner said, "She threatened you," and there was an emphasis on how he said 'you', the long sounds that ended the word dragging out in his mouth so that his lips formed a miniature 'o'.

"Doesn't she threaten everyone?" Bert asked.

"She doesn't threaten you. Nobody threatens you," Reiner said.

"I didn't know you two were so close now," Eren interjected.

Reiner jumped a bit, as if startled by the fact that Eren was still standing there. "Bert's like the mascot. Nobody fucks with him."

"I thought that was Krista," Eren said.

"Yeah, well things change," Reiner told him quickly. Eren shrugged, and looked utterly baffled by the whole thing. 

"Where is she right now?" Reiner asked then. "I will go tell her what I've got to say about that right now."

"Reiner, she's in the shower," Bert said. Reiner's lip curled, and suddenly he was the same kind of ugly Ymir had been. "Drop it, okay?"

"Fine," he grumbled. "But I don't like it when people fuck with you."

"You've done a lot worse yourself," Bert said, and instantly regretted it. He expected that to hit Reiner like a ton of bricks, but the other boy didn't even flinch.

"Yeah," he said. "So I owe you." Eren was nodding along with him. Bert gave them both a disbelieving look.

"Are you kidding me?"

"It's basic bro code," Eren claimed.

Bert wanted to tell him to go back to Kindergarten, but didn't.

"I'm just gonna go home," he said.

"I'll walk you to the car," Reiner offered.

"Hang out with your football friends."

"Don't tell me what to do."

Bert gave him a look of utter exasperation, but Reiner just hiked his smelly gym bag up further into his armpit, and said goodbye to Eren, promising to text. 

"Are you okay?" he asked when they were out of ear shot.

"Yeah," Bert told him. "Just tired."

"I get that. You wanna hang out?"

"Not today. I've got a lot of stuff I need to catch up on because we've been hanging out so much."

"We could study together. I'm in the same boat."

"We'd never get anything done."

Reiner snorted, but he knew it was true. Since the invention of kissing, they'd done little but find places where no one was around to press their faces together. Things hadn't gone much farther than that since the bathroom, but there'd been illusions to better things, and none of those were conductive to passing finals.

"Hey," Reiner said suddenly, switching topic. "Is your family doing anything for Thanksgiving?"

"Having dinner," Bert said, turning onto the street in front of the school's complex.

"Can I come over?"

"Why?"

"It'd be a good way to avoid my family. Besides I'm old enough they're not likely to say no."

"My whole family will be there," Bert said, thinking about his mother cooing over Reiner, and the possibility of him being mobbed by Bertholdt's gaggle of giggling sisters. They'd eat a guy like Reiner up from head to toe before the turkey had even been served. 

"So?"

"Reiner, you're amazingly American. You're a stereotype. They'll be so amused by you that you'll drown in women. Not to mention my grandmother doesn't speak English, so you wouldn't understand anything that we were saying, and she, and mom cook spicy foods that you probably wouldn't like-"

"I don't mind the idea of meeting you family," Reiner said. "I'm gonna have to do it at some point anyway."

Bert stopped dead in his tracks, eyes wide. "You're asking to meet my family?"

"Yeah?"

"Oh my god."

"What?"

"Oh my god."

"What?" Reiner asked again with more urgency. 

"It's just that you're asking to meet my family. You want me to bring you home."

"Is that bad?"

"No. I just didn't expect it. I expected you to be more shy about it."

Reiner looked terrified, and slowly the tension bled out of his shoulders when Bert stopped talking. He smiled then, shaking his head. "We won't make a big deal of it if it happens. I'll just come over as your friend."

"Reiner they'll know. They've got a bet going on weather or not I'm gay. Half the people in my family predicted this." Reiner gave him the text book "yikes" look. "Yeah. It's not like your family where you have to be putting on make up, and wearing dresses for them to notice anything's up. My family actually pays attention."

"I can't even imagine what that must be like," Reiner said almost wistfully. "so can I come over?"

Bert shook his head, and sighed. "I guess I'll ask."

He broke out in a toothy grin. "That's a yes, right?"

"That's a maybe."

"Bert, I'd hug you if I wasn't carrying all my football gear right now," Reiner said

"Yeah, I wouldn't wanna be so close to it," Bert said. Reiner kicked him lightly in the calf.

"I'll see you tomorrow, okay?" he said, indicating Bert's car with a nod of the head. "My car's a block over."

"See ya," Bert said. He watched Reiner walk away for a bit before melting into a puddle of nerves, and giddiness in the driver's seat. He was going to need a little while to calm his tachycardic heart before he tried driving home.

It felt like it had just finally hit that he had an actual boyfriend who wanted to be a part of his life even if it was different than the one he lead himself. Maybe even because of that. He bit his lip, and stared at the car's top for a very long time before he started the car, Ymir and her threats completely forgotten. Levi, and his conversations completely forgotten.


	12. The Black Eye Statement

People had told him for a long time, "These'll be the best years of your life". Then when it came to these years, and high school was not so much a beautiful dream as a sad reality. They'd lied. It made the voices of celebrities, and no names through youtube channels crying "It gets better!" sound like rubbish too.

Krista's black eye stretched from the top of her cheek to just beneath her eyebrow, purple and angry. It seemed like the whole world was quiet, watching her walk back into school Monday morning. Around her, people whispered to one another and Bert felt a sort of kin ship when she looked down at her feet.

Reiner was the first one to break the silence with a simple, "Good morning, Krista," almost as if he were trying to pretend things were normal, but not quite as his voice was too soft and too quiet for normal conversation.

She drew to a stop next to them and looked up at him. He dwarfed her. 

"Can you walk me to class?" she asked softly, and he nodded offering her his hand. She took it before they began walking again. 

Beside Bertholdt, Annie was quiet. They stood for a moment, listening to everyone else in the hallway. She took a deep breath, the sound of air hissing over the teeth in her bottom jaw, "God he would absolutely wreck her vagina."

Bert shot her a look from the corner of his eye. 

"Why are you thinking about that now?" he asked, voice pitched low so no one overheard.

"Thinking about what?" she asked innocently. He watched with dismay as she pulled her goodie two shoes act up around her. Her smile was bright but it didn't reach her eyes and the way she cocked her head made her pony tail bounce around behind her like a hanged man. "Do you need to get your mind out of the gutter, Bertholdt?"

She was doing this to fuck with him, he was fully aware, but now didn't seem like the time to play around. He frowned at her and she sobered somewhat. 

"You're right. It's just a little cheesy in here."

"You sound like Ymir when you use goodie goodie words ironically," Bert said.

"It turns you on, doesn't it?" she asked.

He laughed a bit at the absurdity of that. "Not really. Ymir's not exactly my type."

"Is it because she's not blonde?"

"Why would that have anything to do with-" he stopped talking when Annie fixed him with a look that told him she wasn't having it. It was only then that he realized he'd only kissed two people, and they'd both been the kind of white bread wasp his mother had always talked shit about after PTA meetings. His life was incredibly ironic. All his childhood he'd considered those traits kind of negative and even a bit intimidating. Now it seemed that was his type.

"Yeah," she said after watching his facial expressions during his mind's deconstruction of that thought. "Honestly I'm surprised you never went after Krista."

Bert frowned heavily at the ground as they began walking toward their classes. He'd never even considered Krista to be anything more than objectively attractive. She was too delicate. He had this fear that anyone touching her might break her. Krista was like a porcelain doll that had gotten up off a shelf one day, and decided to become a girl. She was the feminine version of Penocchio. Something too perfect to actually be real. Sometimes it kind of creeped him out.

"She kind of hits my uncanny valley to be honest," Bert said. Annie laughed at him.

"Really? Because as far as Reiner's concerned, she is his child. I mean, he won't admit that but you can tell by the way he deals with her."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Guy was born to have kids. He's already adopted two perfect little blonde haired, blue eyed babies."

"Who's the other one?"

"Armin," Annie said. Bert thought on it for a second, and realized that that was entirely true. 

"Didn't he adopt Eren too then?"

Annie shrugged. "I guess so. Are you ready to marry into a family that's already so full?" she asked teasingly.

Bert shoved her lightly, trying to ignore the nervous sweat breaking out in the small of his back. 

"Worried you won't get to, stud?"

He was worried about a lot of things. It came with his current position in life to be worried. Everything was unsure. 

"Reiner's an ass sometimes, huh?" she asked then, sobering.

"Yeah," Bert agreed quietly. Sometimes Reiner was an ass. Sometimes Reiner Braun was the biggest ass that Bertholdt had ever met. But there were other times. 

Reiner was also one of the nicest people Bert had ever known. 

Annie stopped off at her locker to get a text book, and Bert left here there for fear of being late to Chemistry, and the odd ball lectures that Mr. Zacharius gave. At lunch, Krista sat by Reiner and kept her head down over her plate.

It was almost like watching one of those nature documentaries where an adult male animal decided to take care of an abandoned infant. No one at the table acknowledged her presence. The entire team carried on as if nothing was strange. Marco, Jean, and Armin chatted about goings on around school, and deliberately ignored the big scoop that was Krista.

About halfway through lunch, Sasha mentioned Ymir's absence, and Krista tensed up. Reiner's arm was around her in a second, squeezing her close to his side.

Sasha didn't notice. "I took some notes for her in History because I know she has the same teacher, could you give them to her," she continued, pulling a couple of loose leaf pages out of a folder, and handing them across the table to Krista. 

Reiner intercepted them with a smile. "Thank you Sasha, that was really thoughtful," he said. She looked a bit nervous watching the social faux pas. 

Mina chirped something about cute boys and Annie laughed in the space between their breaths. Reiner slid the papers underneath his tray, and the whole thing was suddenly dropped. Marco and Armin watched with rapt interest.

Krista, and Reiner were likely the only people at the table who knew about what was going on. Surely, Krista had told him. She tended to tell Reiner a lot it seemed. Bert bit his lip, and tried not to let being outside the loop get to him.

Lunch finished out, and fed immediately into a free period. Bert contemplated what to do with his time, and felt at an utter loss until Reiner pulled him out into the parking lot.

"Don't you have geometry?" Bert asked when they were standing underneath the tree by the round about where parents picked up children. 

"I'm ditching," Reiner said with all the ease of the middle class. Bert smirked at him. "I'm done with school today man. Krista's going home, too, and I don't really wanna leave her alone but I also know it's not really my place to be inviting myself along."

"What's going on with Krista, anyway?" Bert asked, trying to make it sound casual. 

"Get in the truck and you'll find out," Reiner told him.

Bert stopped walking along with him. He'd never ditched school before which probably made him sound like a looser because cool kids in movies ditched school like rappers shrugged off insults- in witty and blaze ways while rhyming and maintaining a general sort of rhythm. 

Reiner stopped and turned back to look at him. "Is that a good idea?"he asked. Reiner shrugged. 

"Can't be too bad. My folks are out of the house, and you never know until you try. Could be the best decision of your life."

The way Reiner put it made it sound like it was, in fact, a good idea. Bert started walking again.

It was easy after that to pretend like school had just let out early. Together, they piled into Reiner's truck. They ended up sitting on the couch in Reiner's basement watching television. Bert wondered which cushions were stained with first-time-fluids as he sat down on the center one. 

Reiner took the cushion on the far left like he always did, hooking his arm over the arm of the couch as he flipped channels. He sped past The L Word on a channel that Bert didn't even understand the Braun's having in their house. It reminded Bertholdt of Krista, and all the questions surrounding her.

Who really was she anyway? Only Reiner, and Ymir really seemed to know, and who knew if she was even still spending time with her.

"So tell me about what's going on," Bert said.

Reiner stopped flipping through the channel menu on A Very Goofy Movie. Bert watched it play in the upper right corner of the screen from his peripheral vision.

Reiner brought his lips together so that they formed a thin line. Breath hissed over his bottom row of teeth and down his throat before he spoke, face turned away from the other boy as it so often was when they spoke about things his up bringing would dub "abnormal".

"Krista took my advice," he said solemnly. Bert felt a surge of dread pull out to sea the way the tide did before a Tsunami. He swallowed around a lump in his throat. Silence fell in for a moment, dipped into all the cracks in the surface that was them, and made his bones ache the way that a cavity made his teeth ache. "She met up with Ymir after school, and told her to get all of her things and meet her outside her house."

"What happened?" Bert asked, watching Goofy's kid skate board along an impossible track in thumbnail.

The boy beside him took another hissing breath, and blew it out his nose. "Her father heard the noise, and leaned out the window with a shotgun."

Bert's mind was instantly rushing. He and Ymir had never gotten along it was true, but much as Bert hadn't wanted Reiner to really suffer, he didn't want any harm to come to her. In fact, he had less ill will towards Ymir now than he had toward Reiner then. 

"Did he shoot her?" Bert asked, throat tight with terror.

"No," Reiner said. "He told her foster parents. Krista says he threatened them. They sent Ymir away. Krista hasn't been able to get a bead on her location since."

Silence fell back over them then. In it's presence, Reiner resumed flipping through channels.

Bert was struck suddenly by a feeling of fleetingness as he watched blue blocks of text flick up and down the screen. This was real, he knew that. Reiner was sitting beside him like an immovable rock. Easily, he could reach out and wrap his arms around him for stability and hold on like his life depended on it. It was as real as the couch he was sitting on, and the possible jizz stains Eren Yeager had left behind on it.

But was real really good enough in the end? If Krista was willing to run away with Ymir and start over as a child living on the street then clearly that was real. 

Ymir and Krista had been best friends since their sophomore when Ymir had decided to talk to her and hadn't given up. They'd been the kief stuck to the spokes of the gossip mill for as long as they'd sat across from each other at lunch tables with smiles on their faces. They'd defended one another like tigers. 

That had been real like the lamp on the side table. Real like the magazines sitting out in front of him. Real hadn't kept them safe though.

They'd been ripped apart and brutally, likely at gun point. Bert could easily see them standing in the dark, trying to fight over who protected who from the threat of buck shot robbing them of life. 

They'd probably never see each other again.

It sent a chill down his spine. 

Reiner was breaths away from being robbed of him and all when he'd finally figured this crazy shit out, and finally accepted that this was good. This was beneficial. This was helping them both. 

His muscles were tight across his chest and out into his arms. His legs set like sinewy iron against his bones and the edge of the couch cushions. 

Reiner shifted beside him, hand sliding down over his thigh so that his palm cupped his knee- warm, and welcome, and nothing that actually helped. Bert let him. Bert let him because honestly it would be more a comfort to the other boy to have the contact. Reiner needed contact.

The quarter back leaned into his side. Steady weight slowly pushed against his shoulder until they were so close they may as well have been glued to one another. Perhaps sewn more like one of Mengele's monstrosities. 

They were probably needy and dependent on one another. Perhaps they were even parasitic. Maybe it wasn't good after all. Maybe it was a detriment. A crutch that had been used so long it had become a part of their bodies.

His throat was seizing up now. Really seizing up, tight and nervous. Reiner's hand squeezed his kneecap through the surrounding tissues. Bert wanted to vomit. He felt like his skin was too sensitive, and the television was too loud. 

He pulled into himself, hiding his face behind his hands, and his chest behind his forearms. His breathing began to sputter and catch hard in his over-tight esophagus. He tried to calm it. He tried to tell himself it was irrational. There wasn't even anything wrong right now. This was stupid. He was so stupid. There wasn't even a threat. He just needed to calm down. He couldn't calm down. Why couldn't he calm down?

He hated himself so much right then. He hated himself with so much fervor he didn't know what to do with it. His fingernails bit into his forehead just above his eyebrows and his cheeks around his eyes, leaving indents in his skin that he aimed to deepen until they bled.

Reiner's hand was on his wrists, pulling his palms and his fingernails from his face. Bert tried to fight him. He didn't need any more humiliation, didn't need Reiner to see him panicking. Not like this. Not now.

He clamped his eyes shut when Reiner had finally dragged his hands away. He set his lips against one another too, pressing them into a thin line so that nothing would accidentally slip out from between them. 

Reiner's breath remained incredibly steady. He was a rock. Bert knew he was a rock. Reiner was strong and resilient. Nothing really shook him. He'd been through hell. 

"Bert, look at me," he said softly. Bert shook his head. "Bert, Bertl, look at me, come one, it's no big deal. We aren't them, are we?"

It was true. Bert nodded gently. 

"Open your eyes, yeah? I need you to look at me right now. I can't help you unless you're focused okay, so focus on me. Open your eyes, and focus on me, okay?"

Bert scrunched his face tighter before letting the muscles go slowly lax. Reiner's eyes were golden and burning when he looked into them. They had determination buried in their depths, hidden behind the curl of kindness Reiner so openly displayed.

"You're okay, alright? Ymir's okay. Krista's okay. It's all gonna be okay."

There were hands on Bert's shoulders, rubbing into the joints to sooth tight muscles. 

"I'm right here, okay? I'm right here, and i'm not going anywhere, okay?"

Had Reiner done this before, Bert wondered, looking at the other boy. How did he manage to be so calm and collected. How did he manage to be the way Bert's oldest sister had been when he'd first started having attacks without anything preparing him for this moment?

Bert took a shuttering breath.

"I'm right here, and I've got you," Reiner said. "How are you feeling?" 

Bert opened his mouth and searched for words that didn't come. 

"Shaky?" Reiner questioned. 

He nodded, body still a temple of tremors. 

"I'm gonna roll you a joint, okay? Then we're gonna smoke the joint, and when we're done, we're gonna talk, but not until you're feeling a bit more with it, okay?"

Bert nodded as Reiner's finger tips ghosted over the hollows of his cheeks before being gone. 

He watched the other boy pull a pop-bottle out of a bag beneath the couch. It was followed by a small metal cylinder, and a small, cardboard box. Reiner laid them out on the table before popping the bottle open, and pinching bits of green out of it. Slowly, he piled them in the metal cylinder which seemed to be two halves with spokes inside them. 

It seemed like a calming and monotonous task. The kind of thing that was done with the kind of finesse that showed a complete masterey of an art. 

When Reiner opened up the cylinder again, the weed was ground down into a fine kind of power. He ripped a corner off a magazine and folded it back and forth a moment.

"I've never actually watch either one of you do this," Bert said softly, when he realized that this process was completely alien to him. Reiner hummed.

"I'm making a crutch right now," he said. "Put this at the and and it's kind of like a filter, I guess. Keeps you from getting shit in your mouth."

Bert pulled his knees up to his chest, and curled his toes into the cushions as Reiner started arranging all of his ingredients on a small paper. His fingers rolled edges deftly into each other , keeping one held high so that he could wet it with his tongue and smooth it down.

"Here," he said, holding the joint out for Bert. 

Bert took it gently in his fingers, careful not to crease the delicate paper. The lighter Reiner held up looked ominous. 

It wasn't as if Bert hadn't smoked before, but then it had been one puff while Reiner and Annie were passing bud. Now there was no Annie, and this was being done with intent. This was to get him high specifically rather than most of the time weed was involved when he got high as a happy accident, sitting in a hot box or just too close, or maybe being given smoke through mouth to mouth as if it were meant to keep him alive.

Reiner flicked the lighter on, and studied the tip of the joint as he lit it. "Breathe," he instructed Bert when the tip was red embers. Bert tucked it against his lips and followed Reiner's instruction. He breathed deep, and tried to ignore the burn in his throat and nose, creeping up into his eyes to make them burn and water. 

He coughed and choked.

"First hit's hardest," Reiner said.

"Yeah. That's why I never get to the second," Bert told him.

"If I didn't have to be so stealth, I'd slap a bong in your hands, and it wouldn't be so bad," Reiner said. 

Bert passed him the joint, and Reiner took two puffs off of it, before handing it back. It made rounds like that, the quiet punctuated by occasional coughs until Bert's head was spinning, and his legs were made of lead. 

He felt caught between sensations of being weighed down and floating away. He leaned back against the couch, and watched Reiner laugh at him, half the joint still held between his thumb and fore finger.

"How you feeling?" he asked in an overly friendly tone. It made Bert laugh because he was clearly being strange. "How ya doin'? Ya feelin' good? How's it goin'?" he asked in quick succession, making Bertholdt devolve into further giggles.

"Good," he said, holding his hands to his mouth to try, and keep the giggles in physically. Reiner smiled at him broadly, and went back to finishing the joint off. Bert watched him, content as waves began to crash over his body. 

Reiner smoked for what seemed like eight long years before he finally leaned forward, and snuffed it out in the shallow glass bowl they used as an ash tray.

"How ya feelin'?" he asked again, leaning back into the couch and relaxing with his head craned back to look at the ceiling. 

"Good," Bert said.

"Me too. Now tell me what's up."

There was a moment of silence as Bert fought to compile his thoughts into one cohesion. "I just realized how fragile everything is," he said then. Reiner nodded as if he completely understood what Bert meant.

To be honest, he probably did.

Reiner's presence was firm beside him, and being intoxicated brought him down from the adrenaline that had been in his system during the panic attack. He felt half aware, and peaceful. 

Reiner's hand was in his, fingers warm and rough around his own. He focused on the connection between their bodies for what seemed like an eternity.

"It's gonna be okay though," Reiner said. "Because no one has to know."

There was a comfort in the idea of being able to hide in the tall grass of society, natural camouflage on their skin keeping them anonymous. It felt safe to know that no one knew. Reiner was warm, and real, and beside him, and they were both invisible in the eyes of their betters.

No one could see. No one would know.

Reiner was smiling at him. Reiner was kissing him. Reiner was the weight that pushed him back onto the couch. Bert's shoulders hit the arm, and he curled there, too tall to lie out flat on the cushions. 

Maybe he would have a kind of first on this couch, and add to its legacy. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad.

Touching another person felt like being given life. The fabric of Reiner's ever present jacket rubbed over his knuckles in a pleasing way as he dragged his hands from a prison between their two bodies so that they could find use in gaining purchase on shoulders.

Reiner was still smiling, lips pulled tight at their sides as they pressed into the place where Bert's ear connected to his jaw. 

"We can just keep it between us," Reiner continued. "It'd not their business anyway."

That was the truest thing Bert had heard in a long time. It wasn't their business. It had nothing to do with them. Their lives continued on unaffected by his sexual activity, or lack there of. Their lives would just go on like they always had, even if he was kissing a boy. Even if a boy was kissing him.

Kissing him like life depended on it, biting at his skin, wrestling with his shirt. Bert was impatient, but sluggish. There were so many things he wanted that intoxication made him too clumsy to have. Reiner was still on top of it though. Likely because he had a tolerance and wasn't nearly as fucked up as Bert was despite having about twice as much. Or perhaps it was because he was used to the effects, and better able to compensate for them.

Bert was overly warm, overly constricted in his uniform, the jacket got caught up around his elbows when he attempted to help Reiner get it off and had to be wrestled a bit, but the buttons on his shirt went easily. 

Easily like protests he could have had lined up to curtail this situation but didn't. Reiner's mouth was on his collar bone, moving quickly, teeth pulling at skin. Bert found a thousand reasons in the back of his mind that this was a bad idea, but none of them were bold enough to actually stand forward from the crowd.

Reiner's hands were on his waist band. He felt fingers pushing at his button. His breath caught sharp in his throat. 

Reiner stopped. There was a terse moment of eye contact. Their shoulders heaved from breathing heavily, and Bert swore he could hear their hearts pounding along different, but similar notes. 

"Do you want me to stop?" Reiner asked. His voice was tight the way his hands were on Bert's waist band. 

He thought about it, tried to weigh the pros and cons through the rush that was being as high as he currently was. Thinking wasn't as hard as it probably should have been, but that didn't make it easy. The list in his head continually scattered into the wind, making him start over.

He bit his lip. Reiner was braced above him, one hand on the arm besides Bertholdt's head, the other on the couch back. His cheeks were flushed just the tiniest bit, and his jacket had slipped down off one shoulder to show his uniform shirt underneath, still buttoned to the collar and secured with a tie.

Bert decided then that regardless of weather or not this was a good idea, Reiner was far too formally dressed. He reached up, and pulled the knot out of the tie, watching the progression of his hand on the fabric like it held the secrets of the universe.

It made him feel powerful when Reiner's pupils dilated. It wasn't something he was really apt to feel most of the time, but he didn't fight it. Reiner's fingers were digging into the upholstery savagely, making the material groan.

Bert remembered the tape, and Annie, and the fact that Eren Yeager had lost it on this couch. He felt like he was being watched, when he leaned up, and caught the skin beneath Reiner's ear between his teeth. Reiner's body went stiff, and he whined, leaning further down to give better access.

Someone was watching them. Bert felt like someone was sitting on the coffee table, watching. Maybe it was one of Reiner's friends. Somebody from the football team or something. He didn't feel disturbed by the presence. It felt almost like who ever it was was watching without judgement, uncaring of reasons, simply because they happened to be interested.

Reiner didn't seem to care either. His hands were tugging on Bert's pants desperately, managing to yank his hips up off the couch cushion to pull them down a bit further. The presence shifted slightly, padding around them as if to get a better view as Bert struggled desperately with Reiner's shirt buttons. 

When they'd been all the way undone, Reiner shifted back onto his knees to pull both his shirt and jacket off at once. There was another moment where they caught each other's eyes and hesitated, nervous, but the feeling in Bert's skin that was the third person in the room, seemed to egg him on.

Reiner quivered like a leaf when Bert's fingers met the bared skin of his hip bones. Bert smirked at him, and pressed harder, listening reverently as that awarded him little gasps. In the time they'd known each other, they'd had all of three sexual encounters, two of which had taken place in a school bathroom, one of which had lead to a year's worth of psychological abuse. 

This was different though. They weren't in the bathroom this time, and there was a voice in Bert's ear, telling him that if he were to just go a little further it couldn't hurt. Reiner swore when Bert's fingers ghosted down over the waist band of his pants to trace the outline of his erection through his clothing. He surged back down to catch himself on the couch's arm again, waist nestled between Bert's thighs.

Bert made quick work of Reiner's fly, sliding his hand into the other boy's boxers. It was warm, and hard against the flat of his fingers as he reached down for the head of it. His hand pressed flat along the length, thumb and pinky curling slightly to cup it.

He'd probably never been more aroused. The sound Reiner made, the whispering voice in his ear promising that it would be worth it. Bert bit his lip, and watched. 

Reiner's brow furrowed gently, lips dropping open as he rocked slowly, the motion starting from his hips, up into Bert's hand. It should have been terrifying. Bert had never touched anyone else's dick before now. He felt like there should have been more apprehension attached to crossing this line now, but there was none. 

He was powerful. Perhaps Reiner was heavier, and kind of had the upper hand in position, pinning Bert to the couch as he was, but Bert was the one in control. Reiner couldn't have left if he wanted to.

Bert grasped it, pulling it upward so that it's head peeked out of Reiner's open fly, pink, and over excited. Reiner whined, a sound Bert had heard recorded but never in person. He was winded for a short bit, awed that he'd been the reason for that noise. 

He didn't want to stop. His chest was tight, and it was hard to breathe past the excitement, but he didn't want to stop. At once he had a thousand questions he wanted to answer. He wanted to know so much. What it looked like, what it tasted like, what it sounded like in person as Reiner lost it. 

He caught the other boy's lips as he pushed his pants over the round of his ass for better access. They kissed, Reiner biting at his tongue playfully as Bert dragged a finger along the underside of his penis curiously. The other boy's breath caught, making a strange noise that splashed on Bert's lips suddenly. He smiled around it, hands warm where they pressed into the other boy's skin.

The feeling of someone else in the room shifted again, moving back to where Bert had first imagined it, sitting on the edge of the coffee table. It said something, or gave the impression of saying something that Bert was entirely unable to understand, or even hear. It was probably because he was too preoccupied though. 

He put it out of mind, and focused more on his intent to learn more. There was swaths more to learn after all. He had topographical maps of Reiner's torso to plan in his mind. He had decades of information to commit to memory in mere minutes, and he intended to see to it.

The presence on the table faded out of his thoughts as he took Reiner's cock in his hand and pumped it. The quarterback shuddered, head bowing forward. Bert felt like a god.

For the longest time Reiner had been a symbol of power, and now Bert had had him on his knees twice, had been directly responsible for him having an orgasm once, too. Reiner's hand pressed into the skin on Bert's hip protectively.

Everything went still then. Reiner tensed up suddenly, head snapping around so that he could look wide eyed at the coffee table. Bert's head was spinning, and Reiner's cock was still warm in his hand when he asked what was wrong.

"Nothing," Reiner said softly, clearly a bit spooked by whatever it was he'd seen.

"Tell me."

"It's not important."

"Why not?"

"Because your hand's on my dick, that's why."

Bert didn't push it any farther. He let it drop, and Reiner didn't seem anymore bothered by it. Bert blamed it on the drugs, and didn't give it a second thought because there was a good two hundred pounds of quarterback pinning him to the couch.

Reiner was wicked too. He might not have had experience with boys, but he still had more experience than Bert, and it showed. Reiner teased him mercilessly, licking and biting and grabbing. Slowly, he worked as he fucked into Bert's fist, hissing dirty little words into Bert's ear.

He sounded like Annie when he dirty talked, but Bert couldn't tell if that was because he'd learned from her or she'd learned from him. Either way, he liked it. Something about being told there was a possibility he could fuck the daylights out of something got to him.

Reiner got to him. Reiner got to him when there were hands tangled in his hair, and an open mouth pressed up against his ear, stretched around needy moans. Bert ached for more until Reiner was clawing at the upholstery, and swearing like he was praying to some unknown god. Bert ached for more until more was being spilled onto his stomach, hot, and stinking of sex.

They took a moment, catching their breaths. Bert felt Reiner watch him run a finger through the spunk on his stomach. It was a rather large load, more than Bert had expected. He was almost astonished by the amount of ejaculate one moment, and then the next, Reiner was licking it off of him.

Bert squeaked indignantly, and got the distinct feeling that he was being laughed at as Reiner nudged his fly. He was suddenly very aware of just how erect he was, straining against the fabric of his uniform slacks the way an excited dog strained at an owner's leash.

Reiner smirked at him confidently, lips curled at the edges before he intoned a simple, "Do you want me to stop?" that implied he knew no one wanted him to stop. Bert shook his head with a slight "uh-uh". 

The zipper screeched as it was pulled roughly down. Bert's breath caught in his throat. He felt like Reiner was suddenly his only life line, like if they broke eye contact, Bert would just spiral out of control. 

The quarter back's teeth grazed over his bottom lip as he yanked Bert's boxers out of the way. Cold air rushed in, and suddenly Bert was wrapped up in a warm hand. Reiner broke eye contact then, and Bert was left with a split second consumed by the feeling of free fall before there was a tongue laving up the underside of the head of his dick. 

He sucked air into his lungs as if he had just been winded, only to breathe it back out as a moan again. Reiner laughed softly.

"I'm gonna have fun down here, aren't I?" he asked cheekily. Bert honestly didn't know what to say to that. He substituted his reply with a sharp hiss as Reiner continued, tongue starting just above his balls before working it's way back up.

Reiner's mouth felt good. The basement's chill was long forgotten by the time Bert was worrying about how to keep his hips still. His brain still felt like it was moving at a snail's pace though, and so it seemed to drag out forever, every sensation amplified.

He was close, too. He'd been close before his pants were even unfastened. The excitement of being this close to Reiner after so long was getting to his head. It was all getting to his head. He arched backward against the arm of the couch, and tried to hold on just a little bit longer as he felt orgasm sneak into his bones, and remembered that he'd thought there was someone sitting on the coffee table.

He saw the boy for a split second before the orgasm crashed down around him. One moment, Berik was sitting on the edge of the coffee table, the next Bert was clamping his eyes shut as he came, calling Reiner's name desperately.


End file.
